Kim Shennan’s Post

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Health and Nutrition coach and a Facilitator of Positive Change

Earlier this week was one of those “occasions” when felt that I only got a handful of hours of sleep. Under those circumstances, would you reach for a cup of coffee to start the day?? I hear it all the time; people complaining about how tired they are, and how they are going to need so much coffee to get through their day!  Most people believe that having a coffee will give them a jolt of energy. But here’s the catch: Did you know that caffeine is an insecticide?– a toxin developed by the plant that will get rid of bugs and insects. So, what does our body do when we drink coffee? Our adrenal glands get stimulated, our blood starts to race, our blood pressure goes up – all of this so that our metabolism gets sped up so that we can get rid of this toxin as quickly as possible.  Incidentally this makes us feel good, right? But we are only feeling this energy because our body is trying to get the caffeine out! Once we run out of this energy, then we fall into a habit of needing another coffee to get that high again!  Can you see where this is going?  You drink coffee in the morning to give you the energy to get through the day. But the coffee affects your sleep, so you wake up tired. To get through the day, you start with a cup of coffee…. And so on, and so on. To make matters worse, as with all addictive products, there are uncomfortable symptoms that we can experience when we try to break that cycle, such as headaches, nausea and (surprise!) tiredness. That’s all well and good Kim, I hear you say. So, after your sleepless night, what did you do? The truth?? Nothing…. I drank my normal water, I got outside to get some fresh air, but otherwise, I did nothing special. You see, I have discovered that even when I have those occasional rough nights, I continue to have the energy that I need to get through my day, AND, I don’t even feel the need to go to bed early the next night. Pretty cool, eh? Want to try an experiment?  Want a bit of a challenge? Take a holiday from caffeine for 7 days and see what life is like without it. Who’s in??

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