One _____ at a Time: Cold Turkey Coffee. Holy Cacao!

Speaking of Thanksgiving and "cold turkey" I've been off coffee for three months now--WOW! Still no regrets. My training and energy levels have only improved.

I'm wondering if I've recently discovered that raw cacao is like the opposite of a "gateway drug". Rather than lead someone to more dangerous addictions, it seems like it has a ton of potential as a coping mechanism for someone going off coffee.

I thoroughly loved my addiction to coffee since college. I averaged about 4 cups per day. I just love the ritual. The aroma. The warmth. The food pairings. The buzz. The romance of a dimly lit espresso bar. The opportunity to meet neighbors. I also loved that Starbucks almost single-handedly made the global market embrace shade-grown coffee beans. How cool is that? Forests don't have to be cut down!

But there was a lot to NOT like. The energy crash. The stained teeth. The nasty breath. The shakes. The depression. The feelings of powerlessness without it. The expen$e!

The first couple of times I tried quitting almost ruined my marriage. My wife came home from work and didn't rinse out a dish or something, and I just started yelling at her. She was like, "what's the matter with you?! Did you try to give up coffee again?"

"Yeah"

"Well, get your ass back on again, please."

How does one argue with that? But funny thing that finally pushed me over the edge was truthfully the stink of my kitchen compost container when I let it sit too long with coffee grinds and the wrong combination of food scraps. GROSS! You know how pleasant or unpleasant smells conjure up powerful memories? Well, I was immediately flooded with lots of childhood memories of "scary grown-ups" with bad BO and nasty breath. And there I was, becoming one of those stinky grown-ups.

Getting off the "coffee-grid" just so happened to coincide with a book I had been reading called Naked Chocolate by David Wolfe. Now, I've never been a chocolate or candy-eater in the least, but it was just so strange that I had been having profound chocolate cravings like pregnant woman. I checked-out the book from the library because I wanted to see if I could find if there was something within chocolate the my body was asking for. I truly believe that cravings are a conversation our bodies are trying to have with us, and while it may not always be healthy to indulge the craving, it is always worth engaging in the conversation.

What I learned from the book:

Aztecs used raw chocolate beans (cacao) as money
King Montezuma consumed 50 cups of chocolate before spending the day at his harem
Chocolate has lots of magnesium and most Americans are very deficient in magnesium
The key to chocolate's nutritional power is in its raw form-- prior to excessively heating, processing, melting, chemicalizing, sugarizing, dairy-ladening, packaging, shipping...
100 grams of raw chocolate has 10,000 milligrams of antioxidants--that's 10% by weight!!! Twice as many as red wine! Three times as many as green tea! (To compare, processed chocolate powder has less than 1% antioxidant by weight)

There were pages and pages of nutritional information that I was finding too exciting (and too boring) to read. So I went straight away that night to nearest whole foods store and bought 1 lb. for $12. It felt like a total rip off but I tore into the bag. As bad as I was craving chocolate, I could only eat two handfuls of raw cacao beans. They had a pleasant aftertaste, but they were too bitter to really enjoy. So, I probably ate $1 worth of my new superfood, but it would have taken about 14 KitKat bars to take the edge off of my craving. So maybe, by some logic, it's a deal.

The real magic happened that night, and I'm not referring to the aphrodisiac properties-- I couldn't sleep a wink. I got zero sleep that night and I was only mildly tired the next day. Initially, I thought to myself, "Chris, you're a dummy-- you haven't had caffeine in months and then you had a bunch of chocolate in its raw form right before going to bed. Are you mad?"

Yes, that may have been a stupid decision, but according to Naked Chocolate, there is apparently very little research about the effects of raw foods with caffeine and/or its cousin theobromine. The belief expressed in the book was that cacao doesn't act nearly as wildly as a coffee-like stimulant in its raw form. That sounds crazy after my latest cacao binge.

For me it's not a matter of what the book said or any scientific studies. From now on, I won't be eating much raw cacao, unless I'm craving it. When I do, I will be balancing its bitter taste with some natural sweetness like dates or bananas in my smoothies.

As I write this, I'm enjoying a some killer Chocolate Energy Bars (or "energy turds" as my wife calls them). There's no real recipe, just the following raw ingredients chopped up in a food processor and rolled into balls: