I love coffee. Anyone who has known me since high school knows that I love coffee. I’ve always had trouble getting going in the morning, and coffee was the only thing that would get me functional. In the all-day seminars for my master’s degree, I was known for arriving with a cup of coffee, and downing several more cups throughout the day.
People would tease me about being an addict, and I would tell them I could stop any time I wanted to — I just didn’t want to. People would ask me, “won’t that keep you awake?” and I would tell them, “no more than usual”. I’ve never been good at getting to sleep. I had gone through periods in my life where I only drank decaf, and that hadn’t made sleeping any easier, so I concluded that caffeine didn’t have any effect on me. I also never went through withdrawal symptoms if, for some reason, I went without coffee for several days.
A year and a half ago I stopped drinking it. I don’t know why, but my body decided all on its own that it didn’t want coffee anymore. It wanted lots of greens instead. It was weird.
Within days, my ADD symptoms improved dramatically. In addition to giving up coffee completely (I had learned that even decaf has a significant amount of caffeine in it), I stopped eating sugar entirely, limited my carb intake, and started eating lots of greens. Within a week, I noticed that for the first time in my life, I could go to sleep shortly after midnight, and wake up feeling refreshed eight or nine hours later. No more staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning because I just wasn’t tired.
After improving my diet, I became very sensitive to both caffeine and sugar. I can have decaf in limited quantities; no later than the afternoon if it’s drip brewed, and small amounts of espresso in the evening. Any more than that and I have trouble sleeping that night and waking the next morning. As for sugar, I can have it in small quantities, as long as it’s buffered by something else. Even if that something else is white flour or chocolate, I do OK. Something as intensely sugary as icing puts me over the edge. My concentration is shot, I feel like I can’t form a coherent sentence, and I spend the next hour buzzing slightly. Even complex carbohydrates can be a problem if I don’t have them as part of a meal that includes protein and greens.
These reactions are all significantly muted when I’m on stimulant medication, but it’s still noticeable. For years, I resisted the idea that my beloved coffee made my ADD worse, and that I could improve my symptoms by changing my diet. Now I wish I’d gotten with the program a decade ago.
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