After coming back from my trip to Denver, I realized that my body desperately needed a break from coffee. Yes, I am a type A, and yes, I do know that coffee (when organically grown and preferably cold-pressed) has many health benefits, I also came to accept that my body was addicted to it; I could not go more than two days withdrawal without developing a migraine headache. My stomach hurt upon manual palpation.

Withdrawal from coffee has been quite an adventure. Realize that it's only coffee and not green tea or chocolate that I have temporarily avoided. The first thing that happened was a migraine, of course, two days after giving it up. Then came the cortisol crash. Here I was at the end of my weeklong vacation and I just felt so depressed. It didn't make much sense as I had just come out of that time of the month and the pms should have subsided... but I figured that it's important to just take one day at a time.

Then next thing I noticed was an incredible amount of weight gain (five pounds!). Being as little as I am, five pounds can seem like ten or twenty on a taller person. Since coffee is a diuretic, again, my salt balance was off in my body and a lot of this was retained water (oh, yes, and all that Trader Joe's beer and organic tortilla chips!!). But as of now, my body is slowly coming back into balance and the weight has come back down.

It was kind of funny when I found out that higher weight at my annual OB-GYN check-up. "Oh my gosh, I'm 112 pounds!" did not go over with too much sympathy from the heavy-set nurse jotting down my stats. She, along with another heavy-set RN, were giggling boo-hoos at me the entire time I was lamenting about this five pounds I'd put on.

Now, along with this caffeine withdrawal, I also decided to give my body a restart in the hormone department in the only way I currently know how to do (with pharmaceuticals). I took OTC-lo to get my cycle back with the moon (menstruating around the new, then ovulating around the full). Immediately, the breast tenderness was so prominent. I cannot believe I took that stuff for over seven years!! What really amazed me even more was that I was on an even higher dose in college. Oh, man, my poor, poor liver.

So here I am in August, pill free and coffee free, for now. Other changes I've noticed.... my body just seems to have a higher frequency. As I've started to dive deeper into the world of essential oils, I've heard that coffee actually lowers one's frequency. Maybe that sounds a little new age, but perhaps the roasting process and all the acids created when steamed/percolated have something to do with this. The more I dig into the world of nature and all the intuitive explanations for why things are, which sound too abstract or flaky to Joe Science, the more I actually see the true science in these phenomena and they become even more real to me. Does this make sense?

What else has this coffee-free experience brought me? Well, less back pain. Less calcium and magnesium is being leached from my body from the diuretic effects of the coffee so I'm waking up a little less stiff. The craving for the coffee has also subsided. I can walk into my job where the coffee-shop is across the hall without going insane smelling the aroma.

I don't know how much longer I'm going to keep this up. I heard this horrible urban legend once about some dude who gave up coffee and started to have these headaches and then found out he had a brain tumor of which the coffee had been preventing the exponential growth. Also, back in the spring I had two thermography scans done on my breasts to have on record as a baseline. Rightie has some fibrocystic masses which look fairly benign but Leftie has some stranger growth patterns that seem to be coming from the middle of my chest. The radiologist who interpreted the scan recommended another scan six months from the time of the last scan (which would bring me into December) to look for any changes.

Well, that being said, knowing where the "hot spots" were on the scan, I was annointing my chest with a lavender-based massage oil this week and noticed for the first time a lump poking out from the left side near my sternum. Of course, this could be anything, but it does seem a little suspicious. Does this coincide with the coffee withdrawal? Perhaps. Coffee is, after all, a bennie for type As. It's full of anti-oxidants. It could be keeping those naughty little carcinogens at bay.

Now that I've maxed out my flex-spending bucks with my HSA at work, the thought of paying a copay to have some physician just say to me, "just keep an eye out on it," seems so pointless. Unless a practitioner is willing to biopsy the thing straight from the get-go and get right down to business, I just don't want to be freaking out about the whole thing. However, yes, being an A, I need to be extremely careful despite my age and perhaps take this whole thing seriously.

I've come to this conclusion about the current medical field. While science, in our test-tube way of seeing it here in America, has brought about many significant discoveries, the ART of medicine, the intuition, the subtle sixth sense, is practically lost in everyday practice. But I've decided that the most important thing is to get in touch with one's own body first and listen to it as it tells one what is right.

This brings me to tonight. I visited Intelligent Nutrients store (The IN) because I received a postcard in the mail for a "birthday gift with purchase." In that box was a Wunderbar, some supplement tablets, some powder for an antioxidant shake, and..... a sample packet of organic coffee. Where shall the journey take me next? Do I surrender to intoxicating aroma of Horst's shared abundance and bust open the java?

To be continued.....