I Don't Run on Coffee — or Tea

The office has a nickname for me. The woman with the steadiest blood sugar in the room.

It's a joke, obviously, but I've grown fond of it — partly because it's so unlikely. I'm the one who goes to bed at absurd hours, whose sleep schedule looks like a cat walked across it. And yet I'm also the one who, at three in the afternoon, isn't slumped over the desk, isn't hunting for something sweet, isn't drifting toward a fourth espresso. They gather around the machine like it's a well they're drawing oxygen from. I sit there with a cold cup of goat kefir straight from the fridge — faintly sour, a whisper of natural fizz — and my head is, annoyingly, clear.

So almost everyone eventually asks me the same thing: how do you keep going?

There's an assumption buried in that question, and it's the one I want to pry open — keeping going. It takes for granted that alertness is something you have to hold up by force: that you're supposed to be tired, supposed to be sliding downward, and that only some external thing is propping you back up. Coffee, strong tea, cola, a square of chocolate — the hand under the chin. Almost the whole world runs on that logic. And what I keep wanting to say is: I'm not holding up longer than anyone else. I'm just not falling.

Let me be precise about caffeine, because the mechanism is genuinely elegant and often misread. Roughly: the longer you're awake, the more a molecule called adenosine accumulates in the brain. It's the body's you should be tired now messenger — as it rises, so does drowsiness. Caffeine's trick is that it looks enough like adenosine to slip into those receptors first and hold the door, so the you should be tired signal can't get through for a while. You feel sharp. But — and this is the part people skip — the fatigue hasn't gone anywhere. It's queued up outside, waiting. When the caffeine clears and the door opens, the backlog rushes in at once, and that is very often where the afternoon crash comes from.

Which is why I think of caffeine as borrowed alertness. The problem with anything borrowed was never that it doesn't work — it's that it has to be repaid. And what I've actually been after, all these years, isn't the discipline to drink less. It's a body steady enough that there's nothing to borrow — someone who isn't in debt doesn't need to keep taking out the loan.

A large share of that steadiness comes from something deeply unglamorous and deeply reliable: blood sugar.

We tend to blame the afternoon fog on bad sleep, or on the day being long. But a lot of that heavy-eyelid, get-me-something feeling has more to do with the last meal than with either. When a meal spikes glucose high and then drops it fast, that steep downhill itself tends to arrive with drowsiness, scattered attention, and the immediate urge for something sweet — to shove the level back up. It's an exhausting loop: peak, trough, sugar, peak. Whereas a flatter glucose curve tends to track with steadier energy and more continuous focus. I'll be careful here: this is a tendency, a correlation — not a law that holds identically for every person on every day. But as a personal strategy, it almost never fails me.

So I've built my days into that flatter line. I eat protein-forward, fat-forward — fish, seafood, eggs, legumes, olive oil, nuts. Carbohydrate is present, but it's never the opening act, and never the empty kind thrown in alone. The good fat matters especially: it lets energy release slowly and evenly, like a fuse burning at a steady rate rather than a fistful of dry grass that flares and is gone. And I already eat inside a fairly narrow window — I worked all of that out on a much earlier page, so I'll only touch it: in that rhythm the body leans more readily on fat, a longer-burning fuel, and the baseline of energy comes out flatter for it. This isn't eating less. It's burning steadier.

I want to be clear that I'm not saying coffee is bad, and I'd never tell anyone to put the cup down. Plenty of people I love drink it and are cheerful and sharp on it — that's their body's business, not mine to referee. All I'm describing is a fact about me: when the body is steady enough on its own, the external prop just quietly becomes optional. I don't drink coffee, and I don't drink tea, not because I quit something or am white-knuckling through a craving — but because I genuinely don't need to. There's no willpower in the room at all. A person who isn't thirsty isn't heroically resisting water.

And I don't want to dress this up as austerity, either. If anything it's the opposite — it makes my day cheap and free. I don't live by the machine's timetable, don't calculate whether a cup this late will cost me sleep, don't spend the afternoon being chased by a crash. My alertness isn't rented; it's just there, morning to night, a flat line instead of a string of peaks and troughs. I still keep my late, ridiculous hours. And the clarity that's supposed to show up in the daylight still shows up.

Foodna lands here lightly. It doesn't score me, doesn't count the grams of sugar in the plate. What it does is closer to handing back the aftermath of a meal — which kind of afternoon this one is likely to open into: the flat line, or the drop after a peak. When it reads a meal as steady, that isn't a nutrition bulletin. It's almost a forecast: the next few hours will be clear, and they'll be yours. That quiet little confirmation is the part I care about most.

So the next time someone asks how I keep going, I'll probably just smile and let it stand. The truth is too undramatic to bother with: I'm not keeping anything up. I simply never let myself fall — which is why there's nothing that needs propping.