I’m going cold turkey on coffee for 30 days to see what happens!

Over the years, I’ve been a regular and high volume consumer of coffee. On an average day, I think I’d probably have 6-8 cups which is a mix of espresso and instant coffee. Despite the daily coffee intake, I can drink a coffee at 11pm and still get to sleep in just a couple minutes.

So, why stop drinking coffee? Three words – sleep, cortisol, blood pressure.

I don’t get a lot of sleep each night, I’ve always been a night owl. However, while I don’t get much sleep per night, I also don’t need much sleep either. Looking at my Garmin watch data, on average I get between five and six hours of sleep a night. That of course is at least two hours less than what is recommended and what most people require to function properly.

Cortisol is a hormone that your body produces when it is under any type of stress. It is produced by the adrenal system. Cortisol helps control the body’s use of fats, proteins and carbohydrates; suppresses inflammation; regulates blood pressure; increases blood sugar; can also decrease bone formation; and the cortisol hormone also controls the sleep/wake cycle.

As mentioned recently, I’ve been living with high blood pressure since 2015 when I was 35 years old. I never had high blood pressure before then, I don’t know what or why something in my body changed but it did.

It got me thinking though, maybe as I got a little older, my body’s needs changed and my night owl behaviour, general low amounts of sleep were no longer sufficient to allow my body to recover. Maybe I’ve been using coffee as a crutch for a long time to prop me up and keep me going. Maybe I can fall asleep after drinking coffee late at night, not only because I have developed intolerance to its effects but because my body is generally exhausted.

I always find it helpful to look for an extreme or outlier of some sort when doing research. I think a good example for this might be a professional athlete. Professional athletes have an incredible work load, they are up early in the morning, train multiple times per day, pay a lot of attention to post-workout recovery activities, they place a lot of emphasis on food to nourish their body to help it recover and they prioritize sleep aggressively. Why do they prioritize sleep so much, well it is when your body gets to work repairing itself, undoing all of the stress induced over the day.

My 30 day challenge is simple in nature – I’m going to stop drinking coffee, which will give me a new baseline for what ‘tired’ feels like. I’ll start going to bed earlier to help my body recover better and maybe my blood pressure will come down. Even if the latter doesn’t happen, getting more sleep is a good thing and maybe I’ll feel more alert, clearer in mind, better able to tackle the day.

Stay tuned.

In a previous post I alluded to the fact that I had some other health issues that I needed to deal with separately to addressing my weight, that other issue was my blood pressure.

It’s 1995, I’m 15 years old.

I first took my blood pressure as a teenager because a family friend had a personal electronic blood pressure device which I thought was pretty nifty. Each and every time I took it over the following 5-10 years, it was 120/80 like clockwork.

Fast forward to 2015, I’m 35 years old.

Historically, I’d have been the person that’d say that they’d never had a headache in their life but at this time I started periodically getting really severe headaches. To give you an idea of how severe:

• my head would start to literally pound with my heart rate
• participating in a conversation was very difficult
• I couldn’t concentrate on anything work related
• I’d see stars in my vision, which meant focusing on things became hard
• I would need to leave work

Panadol didn’t help, it was like I was eating a lolly. The only thing I could find that’d help – laying down and sleeping for an hour or two. I’d wake up with the remnants of a bad headache but not what I now know was a migraine.

By the time I’d had two or three of these migraines, Claire had told me to go to the doctor. Of course, I didn’t do that and I waited for a few more to arrive and then eventually went because I’m an idiot. That doctor visit was interesting to say the least, it went something like this:

Doctor: Hi, how are you, what can I help you with?
Al: I'm getting bad headaches periodically.
Doctor: <starts taking my blood pressure>
// More chat-chat, back and forth questions and answers
Doctor: You have high blood pressure.
Al: Oh really, it is normally 120/80 - what is it now?
Doctor: It's 190/110, if it was any higher I'd call the ambulance.

It just got real.

The doctor was immediately uninterested in my headache and focused on addressing my high blood pressure. He prescribed me a short prescription of Valsartan 100mg. After about a week, it wasn’t having any impact so it was increased to Valsartan 250mg. After several more days, it’d come down a small amount but not enough so it was changed again to a composite drug of Valsartan 100mg/5mg Amlodopine and just like that my blood pressure started to come back down to a normal level. Over those weeks I visited several specialists to have my eyes tested (not for vision but other issues), had heart checks done, kidney checks done, several different blood tests and they all came back clear.

Fast forward to 2020, I’m 40 years old.

I’ve been living in the USA for a few years, my medication has changed from a combination of Valsartan/Amlodopine to Losartan/Amlodipine as the former isn’t available but it’s still working as expected.

In speaking with my doctor, I’d said I wanted to try and reduce or go off the medication as I never used to have high blood pressure. The doctor was amenable to trying since I’m 15kg lighter than when I first moved to the US, fitter than when I was 20, don’t eat any material salt in my diet and my blood tests are clear.

The test was to halve the medication and see how my body responded over the course of a few weeks. Unfortunately, it didn’t respond as I’d hoped and my blood pressure went up to around 135/90 initially but didn’t come back down as my body normalized with the lower drug volume.

Normal	systolic: less than 120 mm Hg diastolic: less than 80 mm Hg
Elevated	systolic: 120–129 mm Hg diastolic: less than 80 mm Hg
High blood pressure (Hypertension)	systolic: 130 mm Hg or higher diastolic: 80 mm Hg or higher

In speaking to my doctor about that, he said it could be hereditary and you’re just out of luck. Not exactly what I was hoping to hear, but I guess you win some, you lose some.

Thankfully, living with high blood pressure has mostly been an inconvenience to be fair. I take medication each night, check my blood pressure pretty regularly to make sure everything is on the straight and narrow then see my doctor a couple times a year.

One piece of advice, check your blood pressure even if you don’t think you need to as you often can’t feel high blood pressure. In my initial doctors interaction above, he asked me how I felt at the time and I felt completely fine when in fact I was far from it. The risks of high blood pressure are real, it can lead to severe complications in brain, eye, heart and kidney organs but for most people it can be easily managed.

I’ve always considered myself a fairly active person, certainly throughout high school I couldn’t sit still and was always doing activities whether it was riding my BMX, mountain bike, motorcross bike, swimming, running, tennis or martial arts. At that time I was very lean and weighed in at a fairly svelte 89kg.

Fast forward to university and it look a clear downward trajectory, a whole lot less activity, limited structured sport, poor food choices and the addition of alcohol. I think everyone would agree, not a great combination. Between 1998 and 2004, I was going to the gym regularly and put on a lot of muscle but my overall health wasn’t in a good place with my weight ballooning to about 115-125kg at my heaviest.

Once leaving university, over the next 10 years it came down a little and plateaued at 110kg but I had some other health issues (more on that in another post) to contend with.

When I moved to Seattle at the beginning of 2018, I’d committed to myself that I was going to get my general health in order. Since I wanted this to be a forever change, I was going to make small, incremental adjustments that I felt I could sustain long term.

With that in mind, I used the most basic of plans:

1. Remove or dramatically reduce obviously bad food from my diet
2. Start moving again

For the first point, that meant I was going to remove things like soft drink – I’d been regularly consuming Coke for as long as I could remember but it just needed to go. For the second point, consistency was my main initial goal – I picked running because you can do it any time, you don’t need a partner or team and you don’t need to get in a car to go somewhere to do it.

That basic plan got me from 108kg when I moved to Seattle down to 93kg. I certainly feel a lot healthier than I did was I was 108kg or worst yet 115-125kg that is for certain. Despite removing some obviously bad things from my diet, don’t for a second let me convince you that my diet is clean because it isn’t – I still eat a lot of food that I probably shouldn’t such as pizza, burgers, Thai or Indian.

Good progress but there is more to do, so will keep experimenting to see what works for me.