Use Necessity to Augment your Willpower
It may not surprise you that I like coffee — I am a computer-centric organism, after all. But obviously I’m also health-conscious (though I believe in moderation for that too — moderation in all things, including moderation!*). So anyway, you may remember that several months ago, I decided to make a concerted push to learn to enjoy my coffee without milk or cream.
I used to take sugar in it, too, but when it started negatively impacting my teeth, I forced myself to get used to it without sugar. That wasn’t so hard. Looking around a decade later, I figured that I probably consumed about $5 a week and 200 calories a day worth of dairy creamer in my coffee, and I decided it’d be nice to get rid of it, just because. Also, if I drank black coffee, it’d be easier to accept a cup at other people’s homes and in circumstances where there might not be cream (I hate the powdered stuff, so if there’s no cold milk or cream, I’m outta luck for my coffee).
My goal was just to simplify this little thing, my daily coffee, and I figured that it wouldn’t be half as hard as some of the other changes I’ve made. I mean, really; where on the continuum that includes learning Taiji and adapting to Uberman is "drinking black coffee"??
So, every day for a week, I put less cream in my coffee, until it was nearly black. Well, dark brown, anyway. But you know what? I couldn’t get farther than that. I still liked the mellower taste, and I couldn’t bring myself to stop using cream altogether. (I tried getting rid of my half-and-half, but since the household always has milk on hand for the kid’s use anyway, that didn’t really help.)
Then, a few weeks ago, opportunity knocked.
"Opportunity" was actually two really icky necessities: One, I got a chest-cold and coughed my butt off for a while. Two, a restaurant served me coffee in a dirty carafe, and I ended up with a big blob of something slimy in my mouth (before I spit it out and got the management!), and I spent the next few days seriously squicked out from that. But both of those things turned me off to cream — it tasted disturbingly slimy, and it was aggravating my cough, as dairy products do. Plus, very little else tasted right thanks to the mucus overload from my cold, so basically all I could drink for a whole week was water and hot black coffee.
I could have gone back to using cream last week, now that my cough and the squick have both subsided; but you know what? I didn’t. Now that I’m used to it, I find black coffee tastes just fine, and I’m enjoying how it doesn’t curdle or go gross in the crevasses of my travel-mug, not to mention the other benefits. The opportunity posed by the unavoidable events I experienced helped get me "over the hump" of getting used to drinking black coffee regularly.
Even though I had help "quitting cream", I still get some of the credit. Why? Because it was me that realized that those icky and unpleasant coincidences could be an opportunity to do something I wanted to do, and it was me who chose not to go back to the comfy old status quo when I could have.
So there’s a lesson here: Sometimes you just can’t make a change on your own, and that’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up. But DO continue to keep your eyes open, because very often the Universe will give you the extra push you need to make it happen.
Cheers! ::raises coffee::
*a little-known Greek named Petronius said that. But my favorite moderation-related quote is by Thomas Paine (one of my favorite writers), who said that "moderation in temperance is a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice". Isn’t that awesome?
14 comments
Is your coffee the one where you can see the bottom of the cup? I usually add milk into my coffee. Soya milk only works if you can heat it first.
Then green or white tea for the rest of the day.
xxx
I never get to the bottom of a cup, as I usually refill and reheat it all day long. I don’t know where I got my need to have a hot, bitter drink close at hand at all times, but I think it’s a requirement for my brain to function, now.
I do like green tea, too–a lot!–but I tend to prefer it Chinese-style in small cups during meals, rather than cooling-in-a-big-mug-while-working. And I keep water handy at all times; probably I drink about 3 times as much water as coffee. And of course my coffee is decaf a good chunk of the time!
I usually have loose leaf green tea and just refill with hot water. I add more of the tea when it gets too weak.
I meant if your coffee is that American version I’ve tasted in Holiday Inn. They pour the coffee and it is so weak, you could see the bottom of the cup. Dirty water as the Germans called it…lol
I don’t drink decaf, as I drink coffee for the caffeine..:)
xxx.
For years. I’ve seen that moderation quote (well, a slightly reworded version: “Everything in moderation, including moderation”) attributed to Julia Child. It seems Petronius is little-known to the point of having his best lines scavenged. (Ironically, Julia was probably the last person to eliminate cream from any recipe …)
I am moving in a different direction from you: From black (really, really, really-reallyreally black) coffee to white and green tea.
Milk is ok in coffee every once in a while, but mostly I brew my coffe as black as possible. Usually so black that it passes through ‘bitterness’ and arrives through on the other side and actually tastes somewhat sweet.
Sometimes we just need that extra nudge to put us off our worn tracks.
I drink my coffee black too, but I’ve actually come to prefer a good espresso. You can savor every sip that way. I can never finish the common over-sized cups before they cool off and I require that it be hot… I love coffee, but my options at work depress me! They have espresso, but I refuse to take it in a paper cup. Lol.
Hey, Brice, awesome idea! I may be relocating soon to somewhere with tons of coffee-shops, and I was wondering what, now that I’m a just-plain-black-ma’am type, I could order at fancy coffee-shops. Espresso sounds perfect! ;)
Hehe Ben, I love that so-bitter-it’s-sweet coffee. We call that “trucker tang” where I’m from, because you often find it in (real) truck-stops. I tell people that if I can rest a spoon in it and see the spoon growing shorter, it’s good coffee. ;)
Fascinating, Kevin — Julia Child?? I cut my teeth on so much Greek philosophy that I never knew that, heh.
DIRTY WATER COFFEE (or Dishwater Coffee, as we call it) IS THE WORK OF SATAN. Period.
;)
I put cream in my coffee to soften the acid. And because I love dairy fat.
Good on you, though! You did it!
I got over drinking soda in this same way. I had been working late, over the weekend, in this office building. I went to the vending machine and got a coke, but unknown to me the chiller had broken, so the coke was not only warm, but actually hot, I guess from the innards of the vending machine. I took one long pull of that and that was it, I haven’t been able to drink coke in years.
woot! ;)
Eeeeeew. And doesn’t hot Coke give you cancer or something?
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