Should you drink coffee? One day it’s bad for you and the next day it’s good, so which is it?
Generally, drinking coffee provides a variety of health benefits. The general consesus is that 2-3 cups a day is a good amount to be drinking to be reaping the benefits of coffee.
However, that’s not to say that they aren’t other healthy coffee drinking habits that you should be including in your caffeine routine!
5 Healthy Coffee Drinking Habits
Hydrate and Caffeinate
Match the amount of coffee you drink with a glass of water.
Just a friendly reminder that the average adult needs to drink at least 8 cups of fluid a day.
To put that in perspective that is roughly 2 liters of fluid a day.
While coffee does count towards your daily 8 cups of fluid, drinking a glass of water before every cup of coffee can help you avoid drinking too much coffee, and potentially minimize the acidic impacts of drinking a lot of coffee at once.
Lastly, it can help you feel energized for longer. Drinking water alongside your coffee is thought to help prevent you from crashing from the energetic impact of caffeine.
Stay powered up for longer in a healthier manner by drinking a glass of water with every cup of coffee.
Switch over to Decaf in the afternoon
It’s no secret that sleep is an important part of health. It is vital to our survival and as such, ensuring we are getting good amounts of high-quality sleep is crucial.
While some people are less sensitive to caffeine than others, drinking coffee and other caffeinated drinks afternoon can start to have a negative impact on your quality of sleep.
During my time in Sweden, I watched my friends parents and family friends drink coffee at ALL hours of the day. Sometimes even before bed.
While maybe their bodies can handle it, I definitely notice a lack of quality sleep when I pick up a coffee later in the afternoon.
In fact, even when my body tells me I am exhausted, I lie awake and restless for up to 3 hours before I fall asleep on the nights where I had a coffee later in the day.
Ultimately decide what works best for your body, but a good rule of thumb is after 2 pm, put the coffee down and switch over to herbal decaf tea or cocoa.
Drink homemade lattes
There is something about adding cream and sugar to a cup of coffee that makes it turn into a decadent and comforting mug of joy. Am I right?
And there is no denying that having someone else make your latte for you somehow makes your coffee taste 10 times better!
However, buying already doctored iced coffees and lattes from coffee shops means you have no idea what’s in that delicious cup-of-joe.
Making your own homemade coffee drinks, however, means that you do.
Making the switch to drinking homemade lattes so that you have control of exactly how much sugar and cream was put into your energy boost is a latte better than leaving it up to the barista who has 20 other drinks to make too.
Why should you care how much sugar is in your cup-of-joe?
Well while that is an entirely other pandora’s box, I’ll just say a lot of recent studies are linking added sugars to a variety of chronic diseases.
That’s not to say that you can’t enjoy added sugars at all, in fact, current recommendations say that your diet should have less than 10% of its calories come from added sugar.
This means if you are following a 2,000 calorie diet that 200 calories should come from added sugars.
200 calories of added sugar = 50 grams of added sugar.
50 grams of added sugars is the equivalent of 12.5 tsp or roughly 4 tbsp.
Basically, if you’re trying to achieve a well-balanced healthy diet, you don’t have a lot of room for added sugars so controlling the amount you use in your lattes at home can help you manage them better.
However, this is not to say that you can’t enjoy a delicious coffee drink from a coffee place on occasion!
My rule of thumb is that I try to drink coffee made at home at least 4 days a week, and the rest is up to my schedule and chance.
Add in some cinnamon
Cinnamon is a naturally sweet spice. On the note of reducing and controlling the amount of added sugars in your cup of coffee, adding cinnamon to you daily mug could help.
Because it’s naturally sweet, added a few sprinkles of cinnamon to your coffee can reduce the amount cream and sugar needed to doctor your coffee to your liking!
Not only that, but cinnamon and coffee make a delicious flavor pairing. There’s a reason why there’s a cinnamon shaker at Starbucks.
Cinnamon also offers some health benefits that could upgrade your everyday cup of a coffee into an antioxidant healthful powerhouse.
Cinnamon is a carminative, meaning it can help with digestion. Additionally, it is an anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and can have beneficial impacts on blood sugar regulation.
This means it could help with inflammation, help fend off bacterial infections, and assist in blood sugar management.
Enjoy your cup
Make your morning / daily cup of coffee a part of your self-care.
If you’re anything like me, you look forward to your morning dose of antioxidants and caffeine.
Don’t waste the joy you experience from taking sips of your coffee but chugging it before you leave for work, or by sipping it in your longest morning meeting.
I mean you can still do those things but also make sure you carve out time in the morning to enjoy it too.
This means taking a few minutes to sip your coffee and enjoy the warm feeling of it hitting your stomach, or the delicious flavors mingling on your tongue.
Taking some time from your hectic morning to just let yourself enjoy your energizing cup-of-joe can set a positive tone or the day.
Self-care and giving yourself time to enjoy and experience the things you love is important to staying healthy not just physically but also mentally.
So the next time to make yourself a cup of coffee, take 5 minutes too just enjoy it.
Try out my Iced Mint Cold Brew recipe!
Shout out to my amazing friend Autumn for inspiring me to write this post! The beautiful brain behind “Hydrate & Caffeinate”! Go check out her blog for awesome travel and lifestyle posts!