Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jerf 5254 days ago
"When I went off I was dead to the world for about 2 - 3 weeks.... Not drinking any soda has also helped in other ways. I no longer have a real need for sugar..."

You may be misattributing. Caffeine withdrawal is a matter of days [1]. 5 tops and I'm usually done in 2 or 3. (I've dropped cold turkey three times now, and each time I've personally experienced a marked decrease in my ability to function, but I've got various other possibly mitigating circumstances. I'm planning on trying again with my latest set of circumstances to see if it helps any as soon as my infant is no longer an infant.) Dropping that much sugar out of your diet can definitely take substantial time to acclimate to. (But it's a great thing to acclimate to.) You sound a lot more like someone who has gone through adjustment to a much lower carb lifestyle than someone who has gone off caffeine.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Tolerance_and_withdraw...

1 comments

I went from drinking four liters of mountain dew, 6 cups of coffee and taking 500 mg No-Doze caffeine pills to nothing.

It is possible that lower carb may have had something to do with it. One thing I did notice though is that in compensation I was eating a LOT more candy at first. I'd eat gummi worms and haribo gummi bears by the kilo. The local gas station started giving me discounts on swedish fish! Luckily I eased off that after about a month, and now I eat very little to almost no candy.

One thing I would note is that it has changed how I taste sugar. A lot of sugary drinks such as juice (even natural sugars) will quickly taste too sweet. I also find it harder to eat candy because it just has this disgustingly sweet taste to it. The other thing is that with drinking water with my meals instead of soda I am finding that a lot of foods are over salted, and could do with half the salt and still taste just as great. My personal believe is that people want taste even after making their taste buds taste something really sweet like soda.