The best time to stop eating sugar is yesterday. I wish I hadn't fucked up my body so much with sugar.
I don't add sugar to my coffee either.
What I don't like is "Church Coffee", where it has brewed within an inch of its life and is the darkest, most bitter/burned flavor that ever existed.
I can definitely tell the differences between different coffees or teas or bread etc. The range for wine isn't that large. And that's not just in 'quality', but also just in less variety than eg (craft) beers or breads.
Unfortunately, I add 100 calories of crap to it. But I drink it slower than Coke and it’s at least half the calories of a 32oz (my other vise). I use it as a way to lower my calorie count, just a little.
If you ever want to try and ease off both those vices, I'd simply recommend buying a McDonalds coffee, buying a Starbucks Blonde Americano, and then taking them home and brewing a cup of the folgers instant with no additions. Get someone to pour them into identical cups, and have them play a shell game (move the cups around to hide which ones they are), then try them back and forth. Try to avoid anything with sugar in it for a few hours before. I bet you'll pick out some differences and maybe even like them, then if you want to try and delete the sugar from your coffee, avoid it in exchange for black coffee for at least a few months. It's not as hard as it seems, but it does take some time.
Then if you like, play around with easy home brewing methods like french press or pour over, grinding beans etc.. those were probably the most impactful things I tried when I went on the same journey. Grinding recently roasted beans before brewing was eye opening. I honestly didn't believe black coffee could be palatable, and was drinking Folgers with half and half from the big red can for ages.
<https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/agave-nectar-is-even-wo...>
Stevia would be a non-sugar-based sweetener, though it does have a distinctly different taste.
I'd learned to drink coffee with milk/cream, no sugar. With decent beans (Trader Joe's Bay Blend, e.g., nothing fancy) and a Moka pot that's more than sufficient.
I think a lot of people go espresso at home, but I do think that's an extremely difficult thing to transition to consuming black unless you're really into the hobby of it all and have adjusted. It's just really intense, which naturally blends well with the fats and sugars in dairy, especially with most espresso roasts being darker. If I personally go espresso, it's either a latte or black Americano.
Giving up sweetened drinks and learning to cook healthy foods from scratch have been my most effective lifestyle changes.
Drinking black coffee only has been difficult though, even with more expensive coffee (I'm not sure what's considered higher quality necessarily, but I have an espresso machine and I'm grinding whole beans for brands of coffee that websites claim are good)
I personally do not enjoy espresso on its own enough to invest in that sort of equipment, and am fine just getting that periodically at a cafe.
Anyone recommending any particular coffee on the internet should qualify it with their brewing method and personal preferences, because some people like a french press, some people like espresso, or aeropress, or pourover, for various reasons, and none are better than any other, but some people like the intensity of straight espresso, and some people like what you'd call drip/filter coffee, which would be a classic cone that you drip water through.
Likewise, among "high quality" coffee, there's a world of variety. Many great South American beans lean into chocolatey, but some end up quite sweet and fruity, while east african or indonesian beans can pretty much taste like candy. Quality usually refers to "grade", which is more technical and I'm not too well versed on, but to me it means how well the roasted product reveals the potential of a well-selected batch. Sounds a bit pretentious, but basically if you like bitters or cocoa or milk or dark chocolate, high quality beans will make that very enjoyable, both because it was a good crop from the right region, and because the roaster did their job by leaving enough of the sugars and moisture in the bean throughout the roasting process. It's worth experimenting with all of this.
If it doesn't taste that good, it can be because any of those other variables are off, or the blend that the roaster chose to make wasn't a good selection; they might have chosen to mix a brazillian with an east african and got the balance wrong for your taste, or it's too bitter because they roasted it too long, or it might just be stale, or you just don't like it because it's not your vibe.
Right now, I'm doing pour overs with a Hario Switch or V60 dripper and use a modest grinder. It's a pretty standard and inexpensive setup, the dripper usually comes in plastic or glass, and I get beans that are roasted in the neighbourhood within the month for about ~$10USD or sometimes more, and often they'll be an african or columbian blend. It costs me very little and is a simple pleasure. This is probably what I'd recommend if you were looking to play around, it's cheap and would require only the most marginal of equipment changes. It admittedly did take me a long time to taper off the cream and milk, I'd get it from McDonalds or whatever, but now I can even drink that stuff black pretty easily, but it's nearly impossible to tolerate if you're just side-by-side comparing with a coffee+milk mix, the contrast is too harsh.
I do still drink an occasional soda fwiw, and enjoy a latte, but now that I've figured out how to find and make good black coffee, there's no turning back. I'd rather the sugar come from a dessert.
The best tasting coffee beans I found for the manual grinder / pourover setup was Mayorga brand Mayan Blend coffee (Medium Roast), which you can get on Amazon. Although even then I was putting a little half and half in there.
There's not too many neighborhood coffee roasters nearby (there's only one non-chain coffee shop near us, it's a bit of a dead zone). If I drive half an hour or more I start to have some choices though (three places if I drive 30 minutes, a couple more if I drive further), so at some point I should make the drive (or go a little out of my way when I'm roughly in that area for some other errand).
Going back to it, I think the need to simplify things was key for me. We are bombarded with so many choices, especially in our food products which I've described as the Breakfast Cereal Problem in the past. There are simply too many to consider them all with each shopping trip, so you are almost forced to just make one arbitrary choice and live with it unless you want to be paralyzed in the grocer aisle. None of the choices really offer a significant value or weight over the others, each cereal promising the same thing; to be part of a balanced breakfast, that Gestalt puzzle created by marketers to kick off our day.
Once you step back from that world, it does seem miserably pointless and the same can be said for the SSB's in the article. But on a deeper level, it says something about the stresses we introduce into our lives by chasing too many choices. I can't remember which of his books he mentions this in, but Richard Feynman seemed to have the same realization when struggling to decide what to get for dessert in restaurants. Eventually, be just settled on chocolate cake so he didn't have to make that decision anymore. That stuck with me for some reason, more than any concerns about how soda or whatever might be affecting my blood sugar, pushing me in the direction of just going with the more ubiquitous alternative; water.
Plus with soda at $4USD a pop in most restaurants these days, it's just cheaper to go with water. So we have health, simplicity and financial reasons to not go for the SSBs. Seems enough for me.
/ramble