Coffee

I learned an important lesson from drinking coffee today.

I stopped drinking coffee many many years ago even though I love the stuff.  I consider it nectar of the Gods.  However, it did weird stuff to my sleep.  Not the usual keep me up at night stuff but some kind of weird sleep disruption.  I slept but by the end of the week I was exhausted.  When I switched over to tea, even though it has caffeine  the problem completely went away so it must be some other chemical compound in it that was giving me problems.

Anyway, since discovering that my neuro symptoms improve for many many hours after drinking the stuff I have started my coffee habit again.  I was expecting the old fatigue problems to crop up but I'm on two different sleep meds now so I get a really good nights sleep no matter what I do to abuse my body during the day.  Of course I should be buying the Bullet Proof Coffee offered by the Bullet Proof Executive since it is organic, fair trade and mold free but silly me I'm going out to coffee shops with my son instead.  Way more fun that being politically correct.

Since starting up my coffee habit again I've noticed that it suppresses my apatite quite a bit.  My kid confirms this and he uses it for his breakfast meal so he doesn't have to deal with food in the morning.  Not healthy but he is old enough to know better and he does know better but does it anyway.  But I digress...  

So today we went out to Heavenly Donuts for our afternoon "beans" as my kid calls it and had a medium with lots of cream and a cheese danish.  I love cheese danish and this is the first one I've had for over three years.  I used to eat them once in a while at work and haven't had any since being sick with CFS.  And dang if that didn't taste awesome!  But I digress again...   So I had a medium coffee and danish around 4pm.  I had a cheese omelette at 1pm for lunch.  At 6pm I felt nauseous.  That blood sugar crashing nauseous.  That I have to eat real food right now or I'm gonna barf nauseous.  So why the sudden blood sugar crash?  I had eaten enough food spaced at reasonable amount of time for that not to occur.  So what gives?

I thought about it for a bit and realized that this has happened to me several times after having coffee.  I haven't quite figured out if it is just the coffee causing me to not eat enough food so I get nauseous instead of hungry or if it is the coffee sugar bomb (danish/donut/muffin) combo that is causing the problem.  The donut shop gives away free donuts with a cup of coffee after 2pm so donuts have reentered my life as well.  A little bit more observation should help now that I know what to look for.  Upon further consideration I think that I had better apatite signaling when I was a teatotaler than a coffee drinker. I haven't had the blood sugar crash upset tummy thing for many years unless it was brought on by meds.

So now the problem is how to integrate coffee back into my life without causing blood sugar problems.  Eating yogurt with my coffee instead of a sugar bomb would be a good start.