Quitting Coffee Improved My Health – Food Certitude NUTRITION MINUTE

I used to drink about 3 cups of coffee every morning!  I get up at 5am most mornings and would sip through my giant mug of coffee up to 11am or 12.  Sometimes I would still have some remaining at 1pm and finish it then when I felt an energy drop (or a crash).  After a week long trip where coffee wasn’t easily accessible with a person who hates coffee, I started realizing some benefits of not drinking it and slowly cut myself off completely!  Now I realize the many benefits:

Improved sleep quality & quantity

Caffeine can of course negatively impact your sleep if you drink it too late in the day because it keeps you jacked up into the night.  Avoiding it later in the day can help prevent this and improve your overall quality of sleep, but by quitting coffee all together, it has improved my sleep quantity as well!  Knowing I can’t rely on it when I wake up early and am sleepy, it has forced me to go to bed earlier so that I don’t even need to miss coffee in the morning and know I will have the energy I need!

Better food choices & digestion

Another benefit that came second-hand from quitting coffee was making better food choices that also resulted in better digestion.  As most know, coffee can really help to “get things moving”.  When I first quit, I definitely noticed a change in my morning bathroom habits which caused me to have to make better food choices in the morning.  Including higher fiber food options like whole grains and vegetables helped my morning digestion and helped me feel even healthier!  Making sure I was eating enough calories throughout my day was important too to avoid the mid-day crash since I wouldn’t be able to mask the under-nutrition with a caffeine boost.

Increased water intake

Drinking something  in the morning has just become a habit!  Sitting at my desk early and having nothing to pick up and sip while I worked felt “off”.  I replaced coffee with herbal teas to satisfy the feeling of drinking something warm but also would drink through more water throughout the morning as well which has then improved my overall health and my performance! (Being dehydrated even by 1% can have huge negative impacts on fitness performance!)

Greater effects from pre-workout supplements

When you take in excessive amounts of caffeine, your body gets desensitized to its effects.  I take pre-workout supplements before working out and since quitting coffee I have been able to get my moneys worth and feel better effects from it! Purus Labs Muscle Marinade has about 300g of caffeine and by limiting my only caffeine to that source my body reacts much better to it which has helped me feel a huge improvement in my performance!  {Use kearns20 to save 20% on your Purus Labs order}.

Decreased headaches , acid-reflux, and dehydration

On mornings where I didn’t get enough coffee compared to other days I would experience that caffeine withdraw headache, but on mornings that I did get plenty of coffee I would suffer from heart burn and acid reflux!  The excessive coffee would dehydrate me and I would take in less water because I was busy drinking from my coffee mug instead of my water bottle.  By quitting coffee, all of those symptoms have been removed and I feel much more energized, healthy, and hydrated!