Drinking coffee is a daily experience for many of us, but how much caffeine is too much and what should we do if we want to break our coffee addiction? Healthy Food Guide nutritionist and Lose Weight for Life author Claire Turnbull offers some advice to help you fight the cravings.
I know that I will be unpopular with some of you now, I am fully aware how attached some of you will be to your flat white or morning macchiato. The thing is, for many of you, this reliance on a morning coffee and feeling like you NEED a trip to the café for your caffeine fix has become a habit. The same goes for days when you may have meeting after meeting or catch up after catch up, and end up three or four coffees down by the middle of the afternoon.
Now, there is nothing wrong with the odd coffee, but the issue I have here, is the habit and routine reliance on it, it’s not a good way to go. Coffees made with milk add kJ to your day for starters. Your average (300ml latte) made with normal blue top milk is 800kJ (200kcals), with trim milk it is 540kJ (135kcals). If it was one small trim one a day, or every other day it would not be so bad – but if it is a super regular thing it is highly likely you will be consuming a lot of your kJ/kcals on coffee which really needs to be spent on other good quality, nutrition-packed foods or just plain low fat milk minus the coffee!
You may think that swapping to long blacks or black coffee is the answer, and in part I guess it may be. At least you don’t have the kJ, but this raises another issue – the impact of caffeine on your body. While it does indeed, act as a nervous stimulant and may for some, help boost your concentration, your body adapts to caffeine and over time you will need more and more to get the same effect.
To read the rest of this article and learn how to beat your caffeine cravings, see Claire’s blog.
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