Coffee

Remember back at the end of 2010 when I began my annual alcohol-free month of January, then added coffee and sugar to the banned substances for the month?  I remember saying at the time that sugar would be the hardest to give up, and I was right about that.  Lasted about 6 weeks until Valentine's Day and I baked some brownies for the guys at work.  Such things involve a lot of taste-testing by the cook.

Coffee was a whole nuther story.  I'd quit caffeine months previously, but I liked my morning joe.  The plan was to rest my adrenals, I believe it is, and stop the rapid accumulation of belly fat, by eliminating the effect that coffee has on cortisol.  Sounded like a plan, because nothing else has helped much on the belly fat issue. Well, I can say that for me, at least, eliminating coffee has had no effect whatsoever on the belly fat issue, and since I started craving coffee a couple of weeks ago, I finally gave in and bought some Seattle's Best, which is my favorite.  Would have bought Maxwell House, except that 1) the decaf version cost $2 more per bag at WalMart and that pissed me off; and 2) Kroger didn't have it at all.  In fact, there was precious little decaf on the shelves at either store.  So I went with what I could get.  If I'm going to pay a premium price for decaf, I'm going to get a better coffee.  Period.  I'm loving it -- after over 4 months, it tastes really, really good. 

Still haven't had alcohol, and haven't had any particular urge to do so.  There's no doubt in my mind that I'll put away a cold beer or two over the upcoming summer, but in the meantime, I'm happy to continue giving the body a rest from that stuff.  If only the sugar addiction were so easy to break!

I've had to sit back and admit that depression has shown its ugly head again over the last couple of weeks.  It's something I always try to deny in the hopes that I can beat it that way, but it never works.  I recognize the symptoms -- grouchiness, insomnia in particular -- but try to lay it off to something else.  Not working.  Looking back, it seems to have been triggered by the death of my kitten, for which I still hold a lot of guilt.  There's also been a long string of stress around this house, but that has been stemmed, for now.  For me, meditation is the best medicine for depression, and while I've been meditating, I haven't been meditating well or for long.  Fatigue gets in the way.  Body pain gets in the way.  I sit, but accomplish little.  Still, that's the nature of meditation as well as all of life.  Impermanence!  Everything changes, nothing stays the same.  This will pass.

I rested yesterday, as much because I had no energy as because I wanted to let the body rejuvenate, but today I need to do things because over the years I have learned that action of any kind is the quickest antidote to depression.  And there's work to be done.