I’ve been reading up on caffeine recently (rather enjoyed Top Reasons to be Caffeine-Free and How Much Caffeine is Too Much? recently), and am currently umming and ahhing about going caffeine free. Apparently caffeine can interfere with weight loss (increases your appetite) and certainly isn’t any good for stress levels and sleep patterns. On the other hand, tea is awesome.

Since I decided to do something about my health, I’ve tried to ensure that any changes I made were sustainable. No crash diets, no avoiding things I liked because they had a few too many calories. I wanted to eat better and at better times. I wanted to do exercise I could enjoy and keep up. I wanted to eat pizza and ice cream and drink beer once in a while, but be more conscious of the effects of doing so.

Cutting out all caffeine doesn’t fit into that pattern. Some things are easy to cut out … for example, I only drink coke with Jack Daniel’s, on the rare occasions I do drink it at all, and that’s easy to change in a sustainable way - there are plenty of other great mixers out there. So coke is no problem (and I should really cut it out completely anyway - it’s full of sugar). The problem is tea and coffee.

I like coffee best after meals, and used to rarely drink it otherwise (pretty much only drank it in restaurants). Over the last few months, I’ve been drinking more coffee instead of tea (black coffee with no sugar was better, I figured, than tea with milk and 1 sugar). At work, I’ll go through anything up to 5 to 8 cups of tea and coffee a day, all the way through to 5:30pm. I still enjoy a decent cup of tea, and the idea of cutting tea out completely is not an idea I’m completely happy with.

Has anyone else had any similar experiences dealing with these issues? I’d love to hear what other people decided. Is it even worth trying to cut down on, or cut out entirely, caffeine? Personally, my current favoured option, and what I’m going to try for the next few weeks, is just drinking less coffee and tea, and not drinking anything caffeinated at all after midday.