61–70 of 130 posts
Going off caffeine gives me 2-3 days of indescribable headaches, then it's a pronounced fatigue for another 2 weeks. It ain't pretty. However, if coffee must be eliminated from your diet, I believe you can always use caffeine pills - same energy without any side effects on the stomach.
Why wouldn't he just get treated for H. Pylori if he had stomach ulcers
After this part of the story, incidentally, is when he starts getting better. Maybe it was the lack of coffee, but the antibiotics were probably helpful too.
This is pretty inspiring. It is always amazing to people how much diet and exercise affect their health, which I find amazing that they are amazed. Its fundamental. Of course the ulcers could have been cleared up with the right antibiotics [1] but regardless, Bryan is in a much better place than he was and it doesn't matter which path he took. [1] http://www.cdc.gov/ulcer/consumer.htm
It is always amazing to people how much diet and exercise affect their health This is true. It is equally amazing to me how much abuse the human body can take before it actually breaks down. Sometimes I think it would be better if the results of bad dietary or exercise habits revealed themselves faster - I suppose it would be more convincing and easier to undo the damage.
I personally have never been a caffeine user. I had always assumed that if I used it regularly, my body would eventually counteradjust so that I would require coffee just to bring me back to my original baseline level of alertness. Can anyone comment on whether this is the case?
I have a purely anecdotal case. Before my Junior year of college, I had drank about four cups (two coffee cups) of coffee every morning since I was twelve. That's about nine years of coffee consumption for me. I stopped one day a year-or-so ago, and besides the two-day migraine, it didn't have any noticeable effect on me thereafter. I still drink coffee every now and then, especially during points where I'm lodging w…
I personally have never been a caffeine user. I had always assumed that if I used it regularly, my body would eventually counteradjust so that I would require coffee just to bring me back to my original baseline level of alertness. Can anyone comment on whether this is the case?
I have a purely anecdotal case. Before my Junior year of college, I had drank about four cups (two coffee cups) of coffee every morning since I was twelve. That's about nine years of coffee consumption for me. I stopped one day a year-or-so ago, and besides the two-day migraine, it didn't have any noticeable effect on me thereafter. I still drink coffee every now and then, especially during points where I'm lodging w…
Was that your baseline level without coffee? That's hard to know.
I personally have never been a caffeine user. I had always assumed that if I used it regularly, my body would eventually counteradjust so that I would require coffee just to bring me back to my original baseline level of alertness. Can anyone comment on whether this is the case?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FYI, the dominant theory is that ulcerative colitis is an autoimmune disease, and the inflammation in the colon has nothing to do with what is eaten. Instead, it's due to the immune system deciding to attack the intestinal tissue. It might be provoked indirectly by things like stress, but coffee or other food are not thought to trigger flare-ups. (That said, some people find they can reduce their discomfort by modify…
Good to know. My doctor suspected that I might have ulcerative colitis, but luckily it was not the case. I was highly symptomatic due to my incredibly poor lifestyle habits that I described elsewhere in this thread, so suspecting that I might suffer from UC/Crohn's disease wasn't completely out of left-field.
Interesting view, jperras. For me the caffeine changed loomed largest, partly because it was a nearly continuous part of my day. Eating meals was a handful of hours; ditto adding exercise. But I usually had coffee/soda to hand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But there is a substantial link between dropping caffeine and sleeping better. And there is a link between sleeping better and getting more effective exercise. And it is hard to get effective exercise and still manage to live on something like Mountain Dew (which might prompt an improved diet).
True - if caffeine was interfering with his sleep then it was a problem. I didn't see any indication that he had attempted to fix his sleep schedule before he dropped caffeine, though it's certainly possible that he did. Sleep exercise and diet are connected to each other, and maybe kicking caffeine happened to give him enough motivation or momentum to improve all three of them, but it's only loosely related. Setting…
Reading this gave me chills - the symptoms of withdrawal described here are not unlike those of a heroin addict gone cold turkey. I can't imagine normal healthy people routinely taking a drug and teaching their children to take one. And yet this happens with coffee all the time. Many are even proud of their addiction ("coffee snobs").
I recommend reading "Shantaram" if you want to get a written sense (not that I can confirm its accuracy) of the total hell that is cold turkey off heroin. Both may be tough and painful to quit, but in "Shantaram" the turn off heroin is described as: imagine everything that is in any way good in your life, your being: warmth between your toes, energy to look up at the sky, hope for tomorrow, etc: now imagine every sin…