The Decaf Diet: Is Caffeine Making You Fat?

I was sent this book by the author, Eugene Wells to read and review on my blog.
A basic overview, the author describes and discusses the effects of caffeine on hormones, insulin levels and weight gain.  I was already aware of this information from my endocrinologist and some other blogs that I read, but I have to say that Mr. Wells does an excellent job of explaining this in layman's terms and has a huge amount of references to back up his research.  I also like his writing style, it's chatty and comfortable, and although a little technical in places, it's certainly not confusing medical jargon.

Mr. Wells explains two approaches, either cut out caffeine or find a way to fit it into your lifestyle by making other changes to offset caffeine's damaging effects.

I have Type II diabetes so  I found the section on insulin control to be the most interesting and useful to me.

Many times in the past, I've gone cold turkey and cut out caffeine completely, suffered the headaches, the irritableness and the discomfort, once for up to a year, then like any other addiction, one Diet Pepsi and I was a goner again.  For me, coffee and tea don't seem to have the same lure or temptation as a Diet Pepsi or chocolate and it doesn't take too long to become full blown addicted again. 

Definitely, this book has started me thinking about the moderation and control approach to caffeine addiction and I think I'm going to give it a try.  I'll let you know how it goes.

Funnily enough, there was an episode of Dr. Oz yesterday about a 28 day plan to cut out "soda" because of the double whammy of caffeine and sugar. 

Thanks to Mr. Wells for sharing his book with me and as a way to pay it forward - I'll send it to someone else out there in blog land who is caffeine-addicted and thinks it may help them. Just leave a comment on this post and I'll do a random draw thingy on Tuesday September 28th.