Goodbye coffee and so much more.

Before my Africa trip I wanted to get some antimalarial medication - Malarone.  I had used this before and my doctor had prescribed them to me before, but he still wanted me to come in before he wrote a prescription.  I suppose he wanted his insurance money.

So I went in, it had been more than a year, and he did the usual routine.  He took my blood pressure.  It was 160/100!  Holy crap, that was high enough to scare even me.  I didn't show it and I told him I had just finished running 9 miles, which was true.  He gave me my malaria prescription and off I went.

So I started looking online, reading articles about high blood pressure, how to read blood pressure, about artificial spikes in blood pressure readings, and so on.  I ordered a brachial cuff blood pressure reading machine.

I started to look up online factors that might cause my blood pressure to go up.  Stress - true, I had had a very stressful spring semester.  Diet - I've been on a lunch salad, sans meat for quite sometime. The salt content of my diet was pretty high.  Too much kimchi? Too much fish sauce?  Too much cured meat?  I decided to cut down dramatically.  No more kimchi.  No more cured meats, and for the moment no more fish sauce.  I also stayed away from the salt shaker/grinder.

Caffeine can also cause temporary spikes in blood pressure.  I started taking readings after my morning coffee. It was immediately obvious that coffee was causing my blood pressure to spike by at least 20 points, and it wasn't very temporary.  Goodbye coffee, and caffeine.



It took several weeks, but my blood pressure started to come down.

By the time I got back from Africa it was hitting below 120/80 fairly regularly in the morning.  In fact it was at its lowest about 30 minutes after my morning run.  I had started doing a lot of easy "Maffetone" running.  The spring had been a great running season with two massive PRs for me, perhaps I had over-trained to achieve them?

I decided to try to ease a single cup of coffee back into my morning routine.  Normally I put 16+ grams of coffee into a cup.  I cut this back to 12.  This seemed to work at first.  Blood pressure not going much over 129 too often.  But then the heebeejeebees came back.  Its hard to explain, but its basically a type of anxiety attack that hits me in the middle of the night.  It makes it hard to go back to sleep.  Over the past several years they just seemed to come and go with no real logic behind their manifestations.  I figured it was stress.  However, I hadn't had a single attack during the time I took coffee out of the equation.  I haven't had them since taking it back out.  So yeah, really, goodbye caffeine.

Oh, I will truly miss coffee, the flavor, the ritual, the culture, and that dream of having my morning cup while sitting out on an Italian piazza in retirement.

It's been a lot of herbal tea for me since giving up coffee.  Hibiscus in particular is supposed to help high-blood pressure.  I never saw an effect, and it is very acidic.  I think I'll stick with herbal rooibos chai.

I have been able to bring back some salt into my diet without ill effect, which is good, because fish sauce was an important ingredient in my homemade salad dressing.

Fortunately for me, beer and wine cause my blood pressure to go down.  I'm sure too much wouldn't be good, but so far, not a problem.


I started adding some raw nuts to my salad.  I've settled on walnuts and pecans.  Supposedly these oils are "heart healthy."  I also cut down on the butter, and I only buy the salt free kind.  But I haven't given up my pork fat.  Made up some lard today.  Some of which will be used in an apple pie for my son's birthday.