Living Without the Cream - Part II

Living Without the Cream - Why I Had to Learn to Drink Black Coffee
Part II – What I Learned From Drinking Black Coffee

In Part I, I shared my decision to drink my coffee without cream for a while to increase my mental toughness and sharpen my discipline with regards to nutrition. As I mentioned in the first partof this article, most people who are on a body transformation journey have a “cream” in their lives- the food that doesn’t serve a purpose in the nutrition plan apart from pleasure. Because these small dietary crutches can be abused (i.e. over consumed) and lead to self sabotage, discovering and gaining control over your attachment to your “cream” is part of your journey to success. I am not suggesting that you eliminate all pleasurable food (and certainly not permanently) but simply that you gain awareness of your daily nutrition habits and be on guard for any self sabotage behaviors or budding food addiction.

Below are my lesson from my black coffee experiment. If you relate to any of them, I encourage you to conduct experiments of your own to gain the habits that will make your success with body transformation and other areas of your life inevitable.

What I Learned:

• Most people need a strong incentive, ideally behavioral, to stick to changes. If I were giving up cream to look better in a bathing suit this summer, it would have been easy to convince myself that I could produce that outcome without the sacrifice of drinking black coffee. However since my goal was to sharpen my discipline, mental toughness, and to become aware of or overcome any food addictions I may have, the only path to achieving that goal was to go through the process.

• Set a timeline for the experiment – being overly restrictive or restrictive longer than it takes to gain insight and control can backfire. I failed to set a timeline for my experiment and after more than a month, I started rebelling by introducing other dietary crutches. I reminded myself that I hadn’t given up cream forever, that my goal of the experiment had been accomplished, and that I could move on. When I reintroduced cream, I didn’t like it as much, didn’t over consume it and stopped eating the other foods I had introduced. This experience can also be related back to the first point. My incentive had been met so if for some reason the experiement needed to continue, I needed to identify the new incentive to continue with diligence.

• Inability to give up a certain type of food for short periods of time is food addiction and the best way to break the addiction is to abstain. Addicition is defined as the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming. Although it may be hard to reconcile an inability or unwillingness to give up nightly dessert, wine, or other nutritional practices with addiction- by definition this inability is addiction. At first I laughed at the thought of being addicted to coffee cream but I realized that when you crave, think about excessive, strongly desire, or have an inability to abstain from something (even if it is cream), it is time to gain control. I’ll be the first to admit that I was shocked to discover just how emotionally attached I was to having cream in my coffee- but not any more.

• Completely abstaining from a food for a period of time helps you gain perspective on how attached you were (or not) to the food. If you don’t miss it at all, you obviously weren’t attached to it and if it consumes an unusual amount of your thought time, you really were.

• You can reset your taste buds and nutritional preferences to be more supportive of your goal. Many people say they don’t like the taste of healthy food, black coffee, or water (due to the lack of added flavor and sweetness) but those taste preferences are learned and can be reset if you take the time to develop new habits.

• When you reintroduce the food you may find you don’t like it (or as much of it) the way you did before abstaining. My first cup of coffee with cream wasn’t as good as I had anticipated.

• Complete abstinence from a food that you struggle with consuming “in moderation” helps minimize draining internal dialogue and can improve your mood overall. Once you have already decided that the item is not an option in your nutrition plan, you eliminate the time spent deciding when to have it or how much of it to consume. You will eliminate thoughts like “should I have a bit more” or “should I save it for X event” as well as the guilt ridden thoughts like “I really shouldn’t have had so much” when you eventually get worn down my the internal debate and indulge.

• Being able to master your own behavior in one area builds confidence in your ability to match your behavior to your goals and carries over to other aspects of your life. You realize you are capable of removing things that stand between you and your goal and feel unstoppable.

I am sure some of you want to know if I will abstain from cream forever. Well the answer is… no. I reintroduced cream into my morning coffee and quite honestly it wasn’t as good as I remembered. Some days I have it and other days I actually desire a cup of black coffee. I think lasting change happens when you truly desire what benefits you most. I am happy to have completed my experiment and know that it will continue with other foods (and life behaviors). I look forward to truly desiring a fruit salad rather than my brownies so maybe abstaining from dessert will be my next experiment.

What is your cream? When do you plan on giving it up? For how long? Post below and I’ll support you through your personal experiment!