It’s a flannel shirt day for sure. Overcast, cold, with occasional showers. Perhaps even an un-tucked flannel shirt day.
So I’m off to a slow start. And I need to get my thoughts together anyhow.
Let me blog my way through a few things. Starting with:
Decaffeination T Cornpone.
Source: Gencraft.com AI, with the prompt of Decaffeination T Cornpone.
After abstaining from caffeine for a few weeks, I conclude:
- Coffee tastes awful.
- I want to drink it anyway.
I just finished off a new economy-sized jar of instant decaf, so I’d guess that I’m somewhere around my hundredth cup of decaf. I’m well beyond the detox phase in my current episode of de-caffeinating my life.
Am I approaching some sort of caffeine-free steady-state? Unclear.
In part, that’s because I forget exactly how long I’ve been de-caffeinated. Likely as a result of. But I’ve learned a few things about being caffeine-free.
Less alert across the spectrum
For me, the main problem with going decaf is that my entire state of alertness drops down a gear. The whole spectrum. Everything from more naps, right on up to being slow on the mental buzzer at Jeopardy.
One aspect of that is being less sharp. Less clever. And everything bad that implies. Everything from spending more time in a less-than-fully-awake state, right on up to being generally less focused, even when fully awake.
Stupider. In a word, I’m stupider when de-caffeinated. That’s not just in the sense of being “slow”, but in the sense of being able to reason, period. Less likely to be able to solve a given math or logic puzzle say, at all, let alone within a set amount of time. For me, speed and extent of reasoning are not exactly flip sides of the same coin, but they seem to vary together.
Less get-up-and go.
There’s a reason many businesses supply their employees with free coffee. For me at least, work productivity nosedives absent caffeine.
They say that if you abstain from caffeine long enough, your energy level will snap right back to its prior (caffeinated) level. Eventually. That’s what they say.
That doesn’t seem to be happening to me. I’ve come up from the immediate detox lows, but that’s it.
For sure, it takes me forever to get going on something, absent that cup of (real) coffee. I find myself sitting around a lot. Just pondering what I should do next. Unwilling to get up and get started.
Idling in park. Worse, if I sit idle long enough, I start to doze. That’s unpleasantly geezer-ish.
calmer but No reduction in anxiety.
I think I’m calmer, but I have a hard time defining that. Maybe less likely to react to adversity with negativity? Less likely to snap at something or someone?
I may have some decreased mental jumpiness, I don’t achieve any sort of “comfortably numb” mental state. I’m a worrier by nature, and the decaf version of me appears to be roughly as anxiety-ridden as the fully-caffeinated version.
That said, I’d claim to have a calmer metabolism. It’s hard to say, as this is happening in the context of other lifestyle changes. But caffeine seems to help all your various muscles contract, including the involuntary muscles that run your digestive system. The lack of that constant stimulus should mean that food is not artificially hurried through the digestive tract. And that arguably helps avoid metabolic peaks and troughs.
Pure speculation. But I think that constant caffeine intake is bad for hunger pangs. And so, by analogy, this lack-of-stimulant equilibrium seems to have my metabolism running on a more even keel.
Higher perception of food bitterness, and reduced desire for chocolate.
My coffee methadone consists of one heaping teaspoon each of decaf and Ovaltine. Add hot water and stir. The Ovaltine adds a lot of interesting notes, up to and including some chocolate, depending on which version you choose. But mainly, I use it for the sweetness.
My whole taste-of-bitterness scale has upshifted. The bitter in foods really pops now. And not in a pleasant way. I never took sweetener in my coffee before. But now, I need it.
In any case, coffee tastes a lot more bitter to me, now. Not quite “spit that out” bitter, but getting there. Even decaf coffee. So I’m not sure what chemical substances I’m reacting to. But coffee has has them, either decaf or regular.
Coincident with that — but hardly explained by it — I’ve lost all yen for chocolate. I no longer experience anything I’d call a mild craving for a piece of chocolate. I suspect that whole craving-of-bitter foods thing seems to have downshifted. Of which chocolate is a case-in-point.
Recollect that chocolate, itself, is quite bitter. Ancient Aztec drink o’ the gods, and all that. Take a big bite of Bakers unsweetened chocolate, and you’ll get the drift.
Chocolate candy still tastes fine, so reduced desire for chocolate isn’t being driven by the perceived taste of bitterness. I have not developed an aversion to chocolate. I don’t perceive any bitterness in (e.g.) a very sweet Hershey’s milk chocolate. It’s that a piece of chocolate is no longer a preferred snack. I don’t want a piece of chocolate, mid-evening say, so I won’t seek one. I still snack, but chocolate is no longer near the top of the list.
In any case, a) I’m more sensitive to some bitter compounds, and b) although chocolate candy still tastes great, I no longer seek it. Coincidence or not? To me it suggests that full de-caffeinating my intake may, through some unspecified mechanism, result in reducing my consumption of bitter alkaloids in foods.
One of which, contrary to the way it tastes in candy form, is chocolate.
Time out for a handy list of alkaloids
Wikipedia clarifies that alkaloids a) are carbon-based compounds that contain at least one nitrogen atom, and b) include such notable members as:
- caffeine
- morphine
- nicotine
- theobromine
- theophylline
- scopolamine
- yohimbine
- and little cats X-, Y-, and Z-ine, i.e., many additional -ines.
Chocolate contains notable amounts of theobromine and theophylline.
See also my list-of-plants-related-to-tomatoes (in Post G23-065). Solanine in potatoes. Tomatine in tomatoes. And the list continues.
Falling off the decaf wagon
It rocks. Once I’m fully decaffeinated, that first cup of real coffee is great.
Sorry, but there’s no other way to put it. Suddenly I’m witty, the world looks better, and it’s time to be up and about. As a pick-me-up, it’s hard to argue with. I’m not the first to have said this.
But I have to treat real coffee almost like medicine, now. I actually can’t make it through a mug of real coffee. (A pot of coffee? I used to do that?) Once I get an adequate clinical dose of caffeine, I’m done. I need a coffee cup (6 ounces) of regular, coffee, max.
Weirdly, the occasional AM dose of coffee not only wakes me up, but seems to keep me awake all day, allowing me to avoid the daytime naps and lowest lows of full de-caffeination.
But the first cup is never the issue. If I drink it every day, I’ll get habituated. The required clinical dose will go up. Pretty soon I’ll be hitting my local Starbucks. The old, familiar slippery slope.
Conclusion, Part 1
Am I going to go back to drinking real coffee? I’m undecided.
As a retiree, I don’t get much done in the best of circumstances. As a fully-decaffeinated retiree, that gets a little too close to zero. Whether it’s a case of getting-your-act-together, or getting your butt out of the chair, caffeine is an ally.
I did not expect to get an enhanced sensitivity to bitter alkaloids. Which is how I interpret the new bitterness of coffee, which now requires sweetener, and my lack of desire for chocolate, despite consuming it in sweetened form.
Maybe, after this extended period, I can remake myself as a dose-of-espresso-in-the-morning guy. But I fear the slippery slope back to full caffeine habituation.
We’ll see what happens.
