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Comment by epalmer | Hacker News Reader

I gave up coffee and sodas and feel so much better. My energy during the day is more level and I don't get headaches much anymore. I do drink green tea mostly and maybe 2 cups of black tea a week. I have had 3 cups of coffee in 4 months when I just needed to drive to the airport at 3 am and similar. My concentration is better but I still like a good nap mid day. At 62 years old, a nap is a great thing.

I recommend giving up coffee. I tracked my habit and when I gave up it took me only about 10 days to completely stop drinking coffee. Soda as easier. I drink carbonated water now.

I was drinking 100+ oz of coffee a day most days. I had it easy giving up but I have heard that others with heavy habits get a lot of withdrawal symptoms. I had a few headaches and I quelled them with tea.

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I started drinking green tea and black tea in the morning in high school. Then I ran out. Cue a few days of headaches, bad moods, falling asleep and cold-like symptoms.

Then a few years later I started drinking coffee regularly. Same thing happened when I quit.

Now, I drink green tea in the mornings occasionally and have had no problems with stopping.

If you don't have a need consume caffeine, don't start. It seems to follow the tolerance/withdrawal pattern at even small doses.

I've been drinking only water for years and I don't feel any different from when I drank sugared soda and coffee and everything else. Absolutely no different. I quit smoking and also don't feel different albeit my endurance and lung capacity is much better. Maybe I should go on a month long binge just to remind myself of this mystical awful feeling that people always mention when they've given up sugar.

Two months ago I also evicted anything that's not water during 101 days, meaning no soda, no coffee, no tea, no fruit juice, only plain water. At the end of these 101 days I wasn't feeling better, not that I was feeling bad before but it didn't changed anything during the day, I didn't felt more energy or anything else. Admittedly, it was tough to quit during the first two weeks.

The most interesting thing that occurred was my now intolerance to sweet drinks. Every so often I'll treat (barf) myself to nostalgic trip down high school lane, which consists of a mexican pizza and mountain dew from Taco Bell. I take one sip of the mountain dew (my drink all through my childhood) and throw it out as soon as I get to a trash can. I can't even drink zoke ceros or anything along those lines because they make me feel so bloated.

It's awesome.

There's a bowl of starbursts in my office that I'm currently fighting against. It's new. It's refilled every Monday. It's evil. I actually grabbed a handful on Friday to sneak home, luckily karma kicked in and all of the bags were missing the pink flavor so I didn't eat any.

Same thing happened to me. Every time I try a Sprite (used to be my favorite), I feel physically bad after drinking it.

>I've been drinking only water for years and I don't feel any different from when I drank sugared soda and coffee and everything else.

Did you drank a LOT of them? Because if you were just drinking some in moderation (as opposed to 1 or even 2 bottles of Pepsi a day like I did), it probably didn't matter anyway.

Also were you younger? Because if you did that "break" at, say 25, it's not like you'll see much difference. Your body can still tolerate a whole lot of abuse at that age.

This just in: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/cutting-sugar-impro...

I'm an American who grew up in the 90s, so I drank more soda than water for sure. In fact I don't think I drank water my entire middle school-high school career. Jugs and jugs of mt dew. Thankfully I had an insane metabolism back then.

I stopped drinking soda around 21 or so, I'm 31 now.

I'm doing my 2nd round this year of "30 days without coffee & tea" now (7 days into it). I primarily do it because I feel my more frequent heartburns were because of that, and because after a while coffee gives me the jitters and makes me very impatient, instead of energize me.

Looking at all the comments, and thinking about the effects I feel during this 7 days (and the experience of the previous 30 days), I will definitely want to keep that coffee low, no matter how much I like cafes, the drinking, the flavour...

By the way, for me it took about 3 weeks after quitting coffee cold turkey to stop thinking like "I'm a grown-up goddamnit, I can have a coffee whenever I want!". The 4th week then was really-really good.

Tea is works a lot better, and I'm lucky here in Taiwan for the awesome teas available. But have to be careful about that, a strong oolong (that I like a lot) just as a hammer-hit to the head as a cup of coffee sometimes....

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