Question of the day.

What tastes good and is good for you?

My answer:

This is of course an extremely subjective question, but I think there are lots of such things. Still, I wouldn’t mind if it was more of a pattern that good things taste good, rather than the other way around as it so often is. So, as for the good-tasting and healthy things, I could mention things like olives and kefir for example, which lots of people hate, but I love. Speaking of olives, I like most fruit and vegs, so that I won’t even be listing them or anything because it would be a lot less time consuming to write just the ones that I do not like. And speaking of kefir, I like pretty much all dairy, though whether all kinds of dairy are healthy seems to be quite a moot thing especially with stuff like milk.

Other than that, I love cocoa and it’s healthy, but of course we’re talking about the actual cocoa, not instant like Sofi prefers, that’s too sweet for me and not so healthy anyway. I like strong cocoa because you can make it taste almost like coffee and now that I can’t really drink coffee as regularly as I used to, it’s a nice alternative. People also say it has stimulant properties due to theobromine and can work like coffee in this respect, but it doesn’t really do it for me or not quite to this extent.

I like most kinds of nuts and almonds and they’re good for your brain. Speaking of nuts, I guess a good quality peanut butter isn’t pure evil either…

Oh and then there is all the spicy stuff – ginger, turmeric, chilli, Cayenne pepper, kalonji etc. – I love them! Also garlic, I love to eat it when I’m sick and feel the heat explosion all over my mouth, but it’s a shame with the smell. If it wasn’t the case, or if I were a true hermit, I’d probably eat garlic even more often than just when sick. Onion is decent too, but I only like it raw, and not quite as much as the other things I mentioned. Ginger seems to be good for all sorts of things, I especially like it fresh as it’s more gingery, although powdered is also good. But what I love about it when it comes to its health properties is that it can alleviate nausea and is an antiemetic, and is all emetophobics’ best friend. I like to suck on ginger root or drink ginger tea. Also, I haven’t tested this enough to say anything conclusive yet, but it seems like sometimes ginger can alleviate my migraines a bit, and it certainly can alleviate the migraine nausea. And as for chillies, I’ve heard that they speed up metabolism, which may not necessarily be something I need particularly badly at the moment but it’s really neat that there are foods with properties like that.

And salt, yay! I think I quite recently also wrote about salt and how I could just eat it on its own and lick it when I was a kid. I no longer do as much as that, but I still really like salt and salty things. It’s no longer like I need to have salt with every single thing that it fits in with, unless it’s something that really is yucky and tasteless without any salt, and I’m also happy to have herbs with some things instead of salt, but I do love salt. You hear everywhere how it’s super bad for your blood pressure and kidneys, and I’m sure it can be, especially if you don’t put much thought into choosing a good kind of salt, (we use Kłodawa salt which my Mum claims is a lot better than your average salt and better for people from our part of the world than Himalayan salt) but it’s still an important thing for people to include in their diet in moderation. I’ve always tended to have pretty low blood pressure, and when I was a child many people suggested that I eat more salt, which I was most happy to do, and my Dad always salted my meals generously, probably to compensate for the fact that he couldn’t do that for himself because his has been too high for a long time now. Although I’m not sure if it’s seriously helped in any substantial way long-term. My Mum has a theory that perhaps my childhood love of licking salt and eating it without anything else and salting everything had to do with that, that my body instinctively knew that I needed it or something. So yeah, while these days I don’t feel the need to use it SO much, and I try not to overdo it because I definitely don’t fancy finding myself on the other end of the blood pressure spectrum – low can be a real pain in the ass in various situations, but doesn’t have quite so many scary complications – I do really love salt!

Honey is another thing that comes to mind. I don’t eat it regularly, but I like it nevertheless.

What are such things for you? 🙂

Question of the day (6th May).

Have you ever quit caffeine? What was it like? Did you wean yourself off, or did you quit cold turkey?

My answer:

Yes, I’ve quit caffeine very recently. I felt I had to. I was feeling very jittery in the mornings and my anxiety was often sky high and I couldn’t put my finger on it for a long time why it was this way. I used to drink only a cup of coffee a day most of the time, but very strong coffee, because for me it felt more like a necessity than simply something I did only because I wanted, though yeah, I loved my coffee. I had to drink it because my blood pressure is always very low, so it kinda helped me in the mornings to have the energy levels that little bit higher. It wasn’t really helping spectacularly, I gseem to have fairly high caffeine tolerance and it had happened to me a few times that I actually had a nap after my strong coffee without a problem, but I’d tried lots of other things like strong teas or energy drinks and couldn’t feel any effect at all. Coffee helped at least a bit in a way that I could actually feel somehow. Yet most often after a while it would become so that my anxiety and jitteriness would increase while energy would drop again, and all the dizziness and stuff would be back, and that was pretty bad. So, despite I really loved my coffee, I quit it cold turkey, I was really surprised by that discovery but also kind of relieved that I’ve figured it out. I don’t think I’d been addicted like on a physiological level, I didn’t have any withdrawal symptoms or anything like that despite my coffee was really strong and EVERY single day, which confirms my theory that I probably tolerate it very well but just react strangely. But I’ve surely become addicted on the psychological level and I miss my morning coffee ritual a lot, I miss the taste of coffee. And there is my low blood pressure stil with which I don’t know what to do, I really don’t like the idea of taking supplements or medications for that, yet neither green teas nor anything alike that I’ve tried seems to help significantly. I’ve kinda get used to it over the years but now as I don’t even have my coffee it’s a pain in the neck a bit. So I feel the lack of it.

Have YOU ever quit caffeine? 🙂