What Caffein Does To Your Body

Hey everybody, and welcome to the video about caffeine. This video, we're going to talk about caffeine and how it influences your body. Now, one of the things I've run into with people over the years is when I tell them, hey, you shouldn't be drinking all this coffee that you're drinking, I tend to get a lot of crazy looks like, oh, how can I live without my coffee? What I— let me be very clear here, I'm not necessarily telling you to stop drinking coffee. Or any caffeine necessarily, but I want you to understand how it influences your body because too much caffeine can be a problem, and we're going to get into how that happens. So in the— just going from statistics from American studies, about 90% of Americans consume caffeine in one form or another every single day. Now, there's caffeine in a lot of different things, and we're going to get into that in Just a few minutes here, but that's a lot of people. 9 out of every 10 are consuming some form of caffeine. More than half of all American adults consume more than 300 milligrams of caffeine every single day. So that's the equivalent to 3 cups of coffee. 3 cups. Now, for some of you, that's like, oh, that's nothing. For other people, that sounds like a lot. We're going to talk about this and how to— manage this a little bit better. Okay? It is a drug. It does influence the hormones in your body and influences your brain, so it is considered a drug, and it's the most popular drug in America, being that 90% of humans in America consume this. Okay? Caffeine intake has often been a huge hurdle for people to get over in the journey to health. As I stated earlier, a lot of people are unwilling to let go of that, or that's the last thing they're willing to let go of. However, for people who have regained control of their caffeine intake have seen huge improvements in their health, and there is a very scientific reason why this happens, okay? And it has to do with your adrenal glands. Now, if you're not familiar with the adrenal glands are, They are a little gland that sits on top of your kidneys, and they are responsible for producing your stress hormones, your cortisol, your other stress hormones that go with that. There's actually a lot of them, and we're not going to necessarily get into that right now. But it's important to understand that we have stress in our lives, and if you followed me for any length of time, you know that stress management— I call that the secret key to health. And if your adrenal glands aren't functioning properly, you're gonna have a very, very difficult time, not just with managing your stress, but all the other health issues that can come with that, okay? So when we stay up too late or get too little sleep, it affects your adrenal glands. When you have excess stress in your day-to-day life, that affects your adrenal glands because they're constantly pumping out cortisol. the cortisol and the other hormones that are gonna bump up your blood sugar and give you the energy, okay? These adrenal glands, when you drink caffeine, are also stimulated not just by stress, but caffeine basically simulates a stress response, okay? So it's forcing the adrenal glands to work hard. Now, there starts a chain reaction. If the adrenal glands are working really, really hard and they get fatigued out, The thyroid will follow, okay? So if you are starting to experience what's commonly referred to as adrenal fatigue or adrenal exhaustion, the thyroid will slow down in order to match this. It's— they work very harmoniously, the thyroid and the adrenal glands, okay? So the adrenal glands are constantly in overdrive trying to keep up with the production of cortisol and other stress hormones. Over time, this will fatigue out your body and your production, and your adrenal glands will just have a hard time being able to produce enough of those stress hormones. So it's almost like it's just running out of gas, okay? This will lead you to feeling tired and exhausted, and all kinds of other health issues can follow. Alright, so we don't want to start getting down this path. It creates a really nasty spiral that can be very difficult to get out of. Okay? Oftentimes when we get into this fatigue and this spiral, we are like, I need something to keep myself going. And what do you do? You reach for another caffeinated drink. Maybe another cup of coffee. Maybe a soda. Maybe one of those energy drinks. And maybe a pill. There's— you can get energy pills that are just caffeine. That will bump up the caffeine and the— it'll really force your adrenal glands to start producing those key hormones to keep going, but in the end, you end up crashing because it ends up creating a worse problem in the long run because your adrenal glands just can't keep going at that pace, okay? Over time, this will lead to an increased blood pressure, which can lead to cardiovascular disease. It'll make your sleep more difficult. You may wake up a lot at night. You may have a hard time sleeping at regular hours. You'll want to sleep during the day. You won't get into deeper levels of sleep depending on when you've had your caffeine, which then will affect your mood and your social skills, and that can create more stress in your life. You can end up with chronic headaches or migraines if you're overusing caffeine. Conversely, if we go back to an earlier video that we had in this course where we talked about balance, if you just cut caffeine out completely when you've been consuming caffeine regularly, you can also get headaches and migraines. So there's a balance and you don't wanna just cut this off cold turkey, okay? You will also have increased urination and this can lead to problems with hydration. So if you're constantly consuming caffeine, your body is constantly urinating and it uses water in your body to do that. So if you're having a lot of caffeine and not a lot of water, You're going to end up very dehydrated, which has its own set of health problems, okay? In addition to that, all of that stuff aside, if you're adding other things to your coffee, for example, like sugars and sweeteners and creams and all kinds of other things, if you drink sodas and energy drinks, if you increase the amount— you are increasing the amount of low-quality calories. into your diet, which leads to the whole— go back to the nutrition video— leads to the whole spike and crash of blood sugar. And the cortisol, if you're increasing your stress hormones, that's gonna spike and crash your blood sugar, which will ultimately lead to weight gain, primarily around the midsection. So when we get into this chronic behavior, we'll tend to hold more weight around the belly area. Okay, so you'll get— I want you to understand where the caffeine comes from, and you can see here, it's not just sodas and energy drinks and coffee. It's also— pure chocolate will have caffeine in it, so chocolate-containing products will have some level of caffeine. Sports performance supplements and diet pills, you can go to the— Your local health store and get caffeine pills if you wanted to, or other supplements that you may be taking for other reasons could also contain caffeine. They like to spike these different powders and stuff with these things to give you an energy boost, to make you really feel like this supplement is doing something for you. In actuality, it could be doing more harm than good, okay? Also, over-the-counter medications including water pills. For headache medication, cold medication, pain relievers, a lot of times have caffeine in them. When we get a quick little spike of cortisol, sometimes that can make pain go away. Also, a lot of times people have headaches because they are— they haven't had as much caffeine as they normally do. So something like Excedrin will have a lot of caffeine in it, and the idea is that the caffeine will level out What's going on there and let the headache, which is a symptom of possibly having too little caffeine than what you're used to, it's a withdrawal symptom, and it will get you back up. It's really not a great effective method long-term to try and cope with it that way. So here's the deal, we want to cut back or quit your coffee or caffeine intake. Now, This is a lot of— don't turn this video off right now. Just hear me out. You don't necessarily have to completely quit drinking coffee, especially if you're drinking a lot of coffee. Now here's the deal. If you're quitting or reducing your caffeine intake, you will lower your blood pressure, you will give your adrenals a break, and you will have a healthier cardiovascular system. Yeah. But we don't want to quit cold turkey, okay? Because you don't want to have those withdrawal symptoms of bad headaches. What we want to do is to step it down slowly, okay? And I've outlined this in your ebook, but here it is again. You're gonna take just a little bit less every day, basically, is the strategy, okay? If you're drinking a lot of coffee, let's say 4 or more cups a day, then you may want to reduce at a slower rate and not just go, hey, I'm going to have half a cup less tomorrow, and then go down to 3 cups the next day, and then 3.5. That may be too quick. So limit how much you're having, but just a little bit less than what you're having now for a few days, and then reduce it a little bit more. Other strategies, would be to stop drinking your caffeine at a certain point during the day. You will find that you consume caffeine at a certain rate. Everybody's a little bit different here. Some people can have a cup of coffee at 3, 4, 5 o'clock at night and they're okay by bedtime. They burn through it quickly. Other people, if you have a cup of coffee at 10 AM, you may still be feeling the jitteriness Into the evening. So those are the people that you really want to stop drinking caffeine at a certain time and set a timer and set an alarm for yourself on your phone and stop drinking at that point even if you haven't finished that cup. Okay? So those are a couple of strategies to keep you or get you going in the right direction with this. If you have any questions, let me know, send me an email, and otherwise I will see you on the next video. Next section, which we're gonna start getting into exercise. Really looking forward to talking to you more about this. We'll see you over there.