The Vanishing Cup of Coffee: How to Control a Habit

   I've been a coffee drinker from back in my Army days when those mean old drill sergeants would roll us out of our bunks at 4:00 am. I soon learned to wash down my mess hall breakfast with a couple of cups of coffee to jump start this ridiculously early day. I've been a coffee lover ever since, but sometimes this habit grows out of control. A cup is so good in the morning so why not a little more? Pretty soon I find myself going back again and again for these partial cups. I'm kidding myself that all these partials aren't adding up to at least another cup, maybe two. It takes a flushed face and jitters to finally get me to stop. Then in the late afternoon, the normal low energy part of my day, I repeat the coffee drinking habit: One cup plus and plus and plus and a caffeine overdose. On several occasions I tried quitting cold turkey. This led to headaches and irritability (signs, by the way, that I had been drinking too much coffee) so I've devised a method to sensibly throttle back on this habit. I call it "putting a leash on the habit and walking it down the stairs."
    Setting achievable goals is the key to beating a habit. I decided that I wanted to drink no more than two cups of coffee a day. The first step is to quantify a cup- turn it into a number. By definition a cup is 8 ounces. I could just guesstimate and pour it into the cup, but I'm way too anal for that. Then what? Pour it into a measuring cup? That's a good way to dirty a measuring cup and spill some while doing it. I prefer a digital kitchen scale. A scale is a more efficient and accurate method of measurement. A cup is 8 ounces, but I prefer the much simpler and more efficient metric system. Eight ounces converts to 242 grams. So I put my coffee cup on the scale and pour till I have 242 grams in there.

Weighing a scaled back portion in grams

   Document, document, document. We need to keep records. A sheet of paper will do, but I prefer a spreadsheet. Set up the four or five columns: 1) date, 2) 1st cup in grams, 3) 2nd cup in grams, 4) 3rd cup in grams, 5) 4th cup in grams, 5)Total. Spreadsheets do all the tedious number crunching. We need a record to chart our progress and support honesty.

I was drinking four servings a day when I started this in June of 2013

   When you have this beast collared for about three or four weeks, if desired step it down a bit. Again, set an achievable new goal amount. I took it down to a cup and a  half a day, or 300 grams. It's handy to split this up a bit, so in the morning I would pour 150 grams and the same in the late afternoon. Document it. Again, keep this up a good while (a month or two) and then step it down some more. Did I mention to document it? I stepped it down a third time to a mere 210 grams of coffee a day.

Gone already? 

That's not even a cup. In fact, it's so little that I felt I wasn't really enjoying the coffee anymore so I stepped back up to two 150 gram servings a day and that's where I am now.

By the end of August I was down to a mere two 115g portions a day. 

   We can still have that occasional coffee-orgy of a day. The important thing is to control the habit, not vice-versa. I find a method like this an effective way to scale down a bad habit, like drinking too much coffee or eating too much food. When high levels of consumption of a substance, such as caffeine, has become the norm for the body, it has to be taught a new norm. This takes awhile. I had been drinking a great deal of coffee for a long time. Don't expect a habit like that to be reversed for good overnight. I think a year is a good amount of time to unlearn a habit and just as importantly, teach the body a new one. Sorry, it won't help with heroin or to get that woman out of your head, though
   The goal is to re-teach your body a healthier consumption level, not tediously count or weigh forever. So stop counting or weighing with the confidence that if the habit creeps back you can re-start this technique to beat it back again. Good luck and thanks for having a look at this.
 
This is the one I used