Drinking coffee black is a completely different experience than cream and/or sugar added.
Now coffees that were formerly indistinguishable from each other have become starkly different. light roast, medium roast and dark/french roast are really important to your experience (and some dark roast coffees taste like turpentine to me)
I usually drink one normal coffee in the morning, then afterwards decaf.
Edit: And if you really want to get it proper, rough grind the beans. Don't grind them into a fine grain, make sure you see plenty of half chopped beans in there.
The downside is that you need to buy better quality ingredients. Instant coffee is awful in that it's too acidic without any sugar and milk (I would skip coffee at all if that was my only choice), and as the parent poster said, you can easily taste the difference in any blend now.
I am also a avid reader of nutrition labels.
Not sure it has made much difference to me, but it lowered my food bill.
The advice I follow, not sure where it si from: Eat food. Mostly plants. As unprocessed as convenient.
Michael Pollan famously said, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
I used to eat a lot of honey, completely stopped, not even talking about other stuff like chocolate, or other processed products/meals, I stopped a long time ago, the cooking is done is my belly, no need for fanciness!
I have cut out sugar except for social occasions in the last 10 years and find amazing improvement to my well-being and clarity of mind. The alliance of food mega-industry and politics in the US is one of the reasons the US is morbidly obese.
I routinely score higher on my health checks (we have a once-a-year doctor check-up with blood-work for all employees) than my colleagues that are very fit and engage in more physical activity than me, but consume sugar daily. I also have almost eliminated dental procedures, excluding routine check-ups. Before, I needed a cavity filled every other year.
These are just personal anecdotes, but there is starting to be more and more research out there on just how bad sugar is. Consider doing a personal experiment and see how you feel.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... [2]https://psmag.com/news/the-not-so-sweet-side-to-the-sugar-in...
[0]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/rotten.com/library/crime/drugs/su...
Thus if you pair soda with other foods, those foods need flavor enhancers (lots of salt, fat, etc) to compete for recognition on your palate's sensory neurons.
Since I cyclically try to do this elimination, I get routinely reminded of this as I try to cycle out soda and excess sugar.
It's strangely similar to the difference between commuting by bicycle and commuting by car, with the car mirroring sugar: a rush of power and convenience that appeals to your id, but all your natural surroundings drowned out inside a car cabin with the radio blasting. Not just visual and sensory separation from your surroundings, social separation.
It's one of the major insights I had into the nature of America. Car entitlement is everywhere.
Anyway, I still drink way too much soda. At least now I have transitioned to 1/3 regular 2/3s diet.
But the thing is, I haven't had much soda since I was a kid. I drink tea, oj and milk but most importantly, I always have a big water bottle that I take absolutely everywhere... This also seems to be really common. I always see lots of people in public transit drinking from their own water bottles.
Maybe it's because tap water is clean and cheap here...
Sweetened beverages lose their original taste and cluster around a common taste that feels like glue in your mouth - at least once you wean yourself off sugar. The spectrum of tastes of sweetened beverages is very narrow.
The real killer though is added sugar, not naturally occurring sugar. Or eating too much fruit I guess would count as too much sugar.
