Can you do keto without coffee? Why not?

(Alex) #145

Literally this morning on the way into work they had a dentist phone into the radio show I was listening to who’s ‘sorry-not-sorry’ story was that she’d had 4 or 5 double espressos in the morning and had to cancel all her afternoon appointments because her hands were too shaky to work safely… I was just sat there thinking how ridiculous it would sound if you replaced caffiene with another drug. Like - “sorry I had to cancel your afternoon appointment, inbetween all my morning patients I rushed off to the staff room to snort double lines of coke and now my hands are too shaky to hold a tiny mirror.” :rofl:

For what it’s worth on the sleep thing, some people (myself included) seem to be much more sensitive to caffiene. I went through a year of denial that my sacred bean friends could possibly be that bad and it wasn’t until I was genuinely zero caffiene that I really noticed the impact it had on me. Even one coffee a day and I wouldn’t sleep properly for the next two nights. Even decaf increases my anxiety for a couple of hours afterwards. It’s a horrible cycle to be stuck in.

I appreciate you not wanting to crash your car, so maybe wait until you have a solid 4 or 5 days in which you don’t have to operate machinery and then try going caffiene free? It took me until day 3 to feel less wired, and then I slept for about 16 hours and felt much better but still sleepy going into day 4, then another 12 hour sleep and things started to even out. Caffiene has a half life of 4-8 hours, so you might notice things moving faster for you as I seem to process it slowly.

You don’t have to stick to it if you’re not ready or don’t see a benefit, but like with all psychoactive drugs I’d recommend taking a few days off every now and then!

(traci simpson) #146

I stopped drinking daily coffee due to severe heart palpitations. Now I’ll have it twice a week maybe.

(Full Metal KETO AF) #147

:cowboy_hat_face:

(Full Metal KETO AF) #148

I think you misunderstood me here. Driving isn’t the issue. By “sleep diving” I meant that thing where you start falling asleep and you get a sudden falling sensation that snaps you back awake. It’s what happens when I start getting sleepy mid day as opposed to late at night. Rapidly slipping in and out of a hypnotic state. Coffee snaps me out of that. When I try and really sleep it never works, as soon as I actually lay down I start waking up a little without whatever relaxing but fatiguing activity I was doing like reading or watching a movie. If I don’t drink coffee it gets exhausting because it goes for on for hours. :cowboy_hat_face:

(Alex) #149

I totally read that as sleep driving, my bad!

Life without any caffiene is still exhausting sometimes, particularly the afternoons. My monkey brain doesn’t like sitting at a desk all day I guess. Coffee will definitely keep you awake, just also when you don’t want it too unfortunately!

@Diygurl19 Cutting down can make a big difference too, hope you’re having less heart palpitations now :slight_smile:

(Alex) #150

Ahaha one of my recent internet binges was on dopamine fasting ironically, but like the lovely people in this thread with their coffee, I read it, knew it was telling me the truth, couldn’t handle giving up my digital crutch and went back to checking reddit every ten minutes :sweat_smile:

If you don’t see me on the forum for a week or two, it means the phone has finally been put away for a decent amount of time!

Freelee: The Keto Diet: What they don't tell you
(traci simpson) #151

They are gone! I thought I had a very serious problem a few months ago but they couldn’t find a specific problem so I decided to cut down on coffee to see if it made a difference and it did.

(Eric - The patient needs to be patient!) #152

Next week I’m going to lower and then stop my coffee consumption and keep tea at two cups green a day.

I fall asleep easily but the nights are shorter and I’m hopeful that maybe cutting coffee out will be helpful.

I’ve stopped coffee before for up to a month. Doing this forever seems more daunting but I have made other sustained changes so I’m up for the challenge.

(PJ) #153

My earliest memory of exposure to research is when I was 8 years old. I was listening to the radio, and maybe it was a news break or something, but they announced that they had discovered that carrots cause cancer.

I ran to my mother and told her this. Mom (who ironically was dying of cancer at that very moment) said, “Being a lab rat causes cancer. Go play.” :smiley:

I’m pretty sure there is not a single food that someone cannot complain about being unhealthy in SOME fashion. I gave up wheat/rice stuff for leaky gut inflammation reaction. I gave up nut/seed meals for lower gut 3 hours of horrendous pain reaction. I gave up carbs for my blood sugar reaction.

You can’t have my damn caffeine. BACK AWAY SLOWLY.

(Paulene ) #154

Well, enjoy is a bit rich but since she gave birth to me I figure I owe her something. :roll_eyes: #mummyissues.

(Alex) #155

Glad to hear you’re up for the challenge :slight_smile:

Forever doesn’t apply to anything in this world of ours, so don’t let it scare you off! Just give it a shot today and see how you feel, and then maybe see how a week treats you and so on.

I had a 0% success rate at ‘quitting’, I would always cave because who wants to give up forever? I don’t drink it currently because I don’t want to, but I know I could if I wanted to. I found mindful consumption helpful. I’d challenge myself to days and then a week without but if I ever really felt I needed it I would have some but be mindful of what I wanted and if coffee satisfied that. For me it was either energy or comfort. Taking a week off showed me the impact it was having on my sleep which broke the energy lie i was telling myself, but i still get comfort cravings. Coffee is a very social ritual. Mint and chamomile tea has helped a lot with that.

Good luck with your challenge :smiley: yay natural dopamine!

(Empress of the Unexpected) #156

I’m reading two conflicting theories. One is that coffee raises bg. The other is that it encourages autophagy and fights major diseases. This will take an extended period of experimentation. From what I have experienced it raises bg. Or maybe it’s just the dawn effect. And, as I have mentioned before, I had a heart valve fixed and the cardiologist strongly recommended I give up coffee. Which I never did. I dont drink more than two cups a day. But it is a social ritual. My neighbor would die if we didn’t have our first cup together.

(Paulene ) #157

In what ways, @Alexaar ?

I would always get a headache on Saturday and Sunday morning as I was not picking up my morning coffee on the way to work. I fixed it though - bought a percolator and made my own coffee :grin:

Since being on keto, I don’t feel the same need for coffee. I think now it’s just a habit. I could, maybe should, try to eliminate it.

#158

Learnt some more about coffee in the ketogenic diet.

Context: If you are pursuing nutritional ketosis for a therapeutic health goal, and especially if that treatment is for an auto-immune mediated disease such as an immune mediated arthritis, then coffee is probably something to initially eliminate from the diet. Or, more accurately, coffee is a polypharmalogical drug combination to initially eliminate from the treatment protocol.

The theory goes that coffee is a plant product with potentially thousands of bio-active chemical compounds. In that mix are polyphenols. Polyphenols have been shown in lab bench/ test tube level science to have antioxidant chemical properties. But this effect may vary once in a biological context (within a human body) and the polyphenols may have an inflammatory effect, especially affecting the joints.

#159

I think it may be a matter of finding the right coffee. There are so many different types and processes. After eliminating it. There are potentially years of n=1 experimentation to find the one that satisfies the addiction without the consequential side effects. (sort of like dating?)

#160

Oh, coffee… Sometimes I think about trying to quit. It’s surprisingly hard.
I had lots of harmless enough addictions and my first carnivore days cured them all. Except coffee, I actually didn’t drink it for TWO DAYS! My biggest success with it ever except when I don’t have coffee at home, it’s very easy then (I still miss something but hot chocolate or some nice flavored egg milk easily replaces it).
I don’t know what to do with its role. I drink zillion coffees a day (once I drank 1.5 liters :D). The caffeine doesn’t seem to affect me noticeably and I drink extremely weak ones. But not drinking it? Almost unimaginable. I woke up and drink 4 mugs right away today. It gets worse, I never drank coffee in the morning in my past, only after noon.
Maybe I should find some clearly negative effect, I am health-conscious enough to stop consuming bad things. The problem with coffee is that it seems harmless physically, I am not even a real addict as I am okay without it but I need to keep caffee at home for certain purposes. Once I asked my SO to hid the coffee from me… I even tried normal coffee instead of my usual instant, it tasted much worse but I still drank it. I learned to drink it black. I don’t even like the taste of my current ones now but it fills some void. It disturbs me a tiny bit (but my life has waaaaaaaaay bigger problems so I don’t care very much) that I have some not quite healthy mental thing with it. I try to use it for something, it’s not very effective though. Coffee helps with procrastination… It’s almost comforting but not quite… If I make drastic changes, coffee is something that stays and make the changes a tad easier. I definitely need to improve my life and to use other methods instead needlessly and uselessly drink coffee. But just because I know that, the situation don’t get better.
I tried to use tea instead, I actually like tea and have some little collection all the time. But coffee has something extra and it’s often useful that my coffee has small volume unlike my tea.

As I basically don’t resist temptation, especially not if it’s a drink or food, I have big problems with quitting coffee. I rarely even try. It’s so very easy with food, I rarely get tempted to consume the wrong ones so I almost always practice good habits. With coffee, I always practice and make stronger my not right habit. And my old, strong habits are extremely hard to break. Certain things help me if it’s food but coffee is special, it has its own role and almost nothing can replace it and the drinks which can, those can’t work in every case. They are good enough to replace it when I have no coffee but if I have some…

I am pathetic and exhibitionist, right? Whatever, it’s the truth. I am a weak one :cry:
Now I whined about this topic, I won’t do it again. Maybe I will try harder. I actually have some tiny reasons to quit. Not a single serious one, that’s why it’s hard. It’s some slightly not okay mental thing, not physical. And while determination helps me immensely, I just can’t get determined about quitting coffee. Almost anything but. Quitting added sugar? It was nothing (it seems I wasn’t addicted to it at all. I feel lucky as it seems it’s nor common). Gluten-free years? Easy. Not eating for some days ust because I decide it? No problem. A day without coffee? Well, that’s tough. It’s on the level of a low-fat day and I know low-fat is an insane, bad idea for me. But I did it once out of curiosity. I am not curious what would happen without coffee. Nothing interesting would happen.

#161

David and coffee

https://www.ketogenicforums.com/t/ilanas-adventures-with-the-pkd-diet-and-obsessively-tracking-everything/96952/16

(Jenna Ericson) #163

I watched this linked video discussion between Mark Sisson and Paul Saladino and loved it, despite being a little confused because I didn’t hear them talk about coffee specifically at all :thinking: I’m not sure if I’m missing something, but I’m glad I watched it either way!

One of the things that the video made me think about was the importance of the difference between genotype and phenotype and how overlooked this difference is in medicine. I feel like in general doctors tend to think that a disease or issue that has a genetic component is inevitable and unavoidable, but what if our environment’s effect on gene expression plays a bigger role than we thought in “genetic” diseases?

I thought Dr. Saladino’s non-ketogenic carnivore diet where he added in honey was very interesting.

It’s also interesting to see the shift between schools of thought and how they seem to happen naturally as we gain access to more information about diet and nutrition. Mark Sisson admits that he had thought of veggies as the basis for a healthy diet, and not necessarily animal products (hence his Primal Kitchen salad dressings), but he seemed to be open to changing his mind.

One random thing that I wonder…a question people like to ask about a carnivore diet is, “how do you get enough vitamin C?” Guess what vitamin C does…It “contributes to immune defense by supporting various cellular functions of both the innate and adaptive immune system” (from google). If one of the main benefits of a carnivore diet is as an elimination diet, then maybe you need less vitamin C because your immune system isn’t in constant defense mode.

(Joey) #164

I haven’t read this entire thread, but the title gave me a chuckle…

“Can you do keto without coffee?”

Hell, I can’t even do consciousness without coffee. :woozy_face:

#165

After my post I went without coffee for almost 5 days. Considering 1 day while I am at home is borderline miracle in my life, I am very pleased with myself :smiley: I only brought it back when I had a headache (not like it helps much when the reason is bad sleep but a little help is something)… And it got harder afterwards but I barely drink coffee now and plan to hid my coffee again :stuck_out_tongue: For a longer time if possible.