Or alternately titled "Why do I do this to myself?"
I started seriously drinking coffee when I was 14 years old. I had my first job working as a nursing assistant in a retirement home. I worked 2-3 evenings a week till 9:30. The dining room always had 2-3 pots of coffee brewed, just ready for the taking. Within months I was up to drinking at least a pot of coffee a shift. Amazingly caffeine has never interfered with my sleep. Quite the opposite actually. It seems that the soothing heat of a hot cup of coffee late at night will lull me to sleep instead of keeping me up. That being said, it certainly wasn't much help when I was cramming for exams.
I started drinking coffee with milk and sugar, but in my early twenties I switched to black. But then I developed hypo-glycemia and had many fainting spells from low blood sugar. I also smoked at the time. After too many instances of feeling woozy (or passing out completely) I finally made the connection that if I smoked while drinking black coffee I would pass out. Who knows what was so special about that combination, but adding milk and sugar back into my coffee solved the problem (and no, at the time the idea of quitting smoking never even entered into the realm of possibilities).
I continued on with my love affair of coffee, drinking several a day. Until I decided to get serious about losing weight. When I looked at my overall diet, the quickest hit for cutting out calories was to cut back on my coffee intake. A medium double double from Tim Horton's is 230 calories. That is currently 17% of my daily intake. It seemed like a no brainer.
Cutting out coffees on the go was easy. Cutting back on my morning coffees at home took a bit more work, but eventually I got down to just one a day. I'm not willing to give it up completely. And so for the past 9 months or so, I've enjoyed a single cup of coffee before work. But every now and then, if I have a bit more time in the morning, I figure that I will splurge and have that second cup. We don't use cream at home, and the cups are smaller then they are at Timmie's, so from a calorie point of view, it's not that bad.
The problem though? My body seems to have gotten used to a single cup of coffee and the second one now has me doubled over in pain, EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. And yet do I learn? Of course not. It's not until I'm sipping the last drop and the pain in my upper rib cage starts that I have a D'oh! moment. The pain lasts for about 30 minutes and nothing seems to help it move along any faster. I'm such a slow learner that I think I need to put a post it note in the cupboard by the sugar bowl that reads:
Why does the lure of good food always win out over common sense?
