Day two...

For the New Year, I started an elimination diet, one of those ones where you eliminate all the foods that are most likely to annoy your body: dairy, wheat, beef & pork & shellfish, most citrus, nightshades, alcohol, and caffeine, as well as assorted other items, processed foods, etc... The Usual Suspects as it were. I've done this before, but I never even tried to give up caffeine. I might cut down a bit... Up the ratio of decaf that I use, but QUIT caffeine? Not going to happen!

This year I figured, why not go whole hog? Why not give up caffeine, or die trying, which, I swear to the gods I don't believe in, is what giving up coffee - my form of caffeine - and the primary one they're talking about, feels like to me. There are the headaches, the lethargy, the sleepiness, the general fog that come with a serious coffee drinker giving up their drug of choice.

Pages 6 & 7 from Red Lead.

Now for those of you who may be thinking that this is a blog primarily about my journals, let me just say that an awful lot of coffee drinking goes on in my journals. An awful lot. There are coffee rings on pages of  journals, photos of coffee mugs, commentaries on coffee, shoot, there's a lot about coffee...

So quitting drinking coffee has serious repercussions, on top of the lethargy, fatigue, sleepiness, wooly thinking and all the other stuff. I'm losing something to write about!

Perhaps I'll start writing paeans to herbal tea.

Detail of really cute mug...

Perhaps not.

Now in case you're wondering about that mug... I saw it at the HEB (the large family-owned chain of grocery stores here in Texas) and it was $2. You can't tell it from the drawing, but it's H U G E! (Actually, it seems like an interesting approach to putting up Christmas lights...)

So, I've cut down daily for the last three days on my ratio of caffeine to decaf, and cut down on the amount I make, and, yup, the headaches - I never get headaches, for pete's sake - have come, and the lethargy, and the wooly thinking and the sleepiness. Last night I went into my bedroom around 8 thinking I would sit down on my bed for a bit and look at a magazine I'd gotten. I fell fast asleep immediately, with the lights and my clothes on, and didn't wake up until midnight. I sat up, and thot "Uh oh, I won't be able to go back to sleep now," changed into my pjs, lay down and woke up at 8 am. That's twelve hours almost of sleep. TWELVE HOURS! Teenagers sleep for twelve hours; adults do not.

Well, apparently caffeine-deprived ones do...

And thank you to all of you who posted encouraging words.