Coffee, Tea and Chocolate: A New Perspective

Lately I have been drinking  a good deal less coffee and tea and consuming more chocolate instead. This is not a conscious choice I am making, but rather a spontaneous decision that I have been making on a consistent basis. I find myself drinking tea only once or twice a day -- one mug in the morning and another tea in the evening. The only time I have been drinking coffee is when I am outside my apartment, particularly when I visit the hospital for reasons that I have been dealing with for some time now. 

Another change that I have made (and one I have been making for almost a year) is to refrain from all forms of smoking. .This is a far more weighty decision and one more consciously considered than the others. It is one of the few decisions that I have made that I am unlikely to regret, and one I would heartily recommend to others. You may well ask how I managed to finally quit for good (I smoked nearly forty years) . One of the aids that I found particularly effective was to drink a lot of cold water in a tall glass with a straw. For me, this mimics quite nicely the oral fixation I developed when I was actually smoking. The only real drawback I experience is the need to visit the john on a frequent basis.  This is the real reason why I don't drink coffee or tea as much as I did previously. But even this newly formed habit  of mine is not without risks. I have been warned by many in the medical field that I run the risk of developing "water intoxication." What water intoxication actually means I am unsure. From what I can gather, this problem is quite rare. In  any event, a gallon of water seems to be the amount above which I need to really worry. 

Fortunately for me I no longer experience what is referred to in this country as edema, a medical condition involving swelling of the legs. To be quite frank, I find these problems to be a relatively minor concern. They pale in comparison with the smoking habit itself. And, though this attitude is for me a big change from the way I used to think about cigarettes, it is one that I am unlikely to regret.