Week 3: No Calories in Your Drinks

I might do the introduction stuff a little bit later, but for right now we're just going to jump into the middle of things.

Ever since I changed jobs in January I've been well blessed to be part of a company that makes an effort to help its employees stay healthy. There is a gym provided at the office building, and a professional trainer on staff that leads group workouts three days each week. Subsidized Weight Watchers subscriptions are available. Hot coffee and chilled water are available free, and the food on sale in the vending area is mostly not horrible.

Except for these things. A constant temptation these. 

Anyway, they also sponsor some weight loss challenges. I'm currently in Week 3 of an 8 Week challenge. In addition to the ultimate challenge of losing as much weight as possible in 8 weeks, each week has its own special challenge that, if completed successfully, adds a bonus to your weight loss total for purposes of handing out the prizes.

Pictured above: Motivation

The challenge for Week 3 is deceptively simple: No calories in your drinks. None. So no soda, obviously, but also no tea (bottled tea, anyway), no cream or sugar in coffee, no fruit juice or milk, nothing. 

Now this should be relatively easy. Although some of the more awful fruit juice cocktails and energy drinks are available for sale at work, the price is jacked up to extortion levels and so not particularly difficult to say no to. Water is available free, as is coffee, as is sugar and creamer for coffee...

Uh, we've got a small problem here

So really this boils down to a post about drinking black coffee. I only started drinking coffee at all as a way to get caffeine without soda. Some people (looking at you, wife) enjoy the taste of bitter black coffee. 

I don't understand it. 

This is not a pleasant drink, it's a tool. It keeps me from setting fire to my computer. Over the years I've been able to remove sugar from my coffee pretty consistently, but cream... coffee without cream is just cruel. 

So I have a couple of options: 

1. Suck it up and cope. This has been a surprisingly effective strategy so far, and I expect it to carry me through the week. Fill my mug with black coffee. Walk away. Let it cool down to non-scalding levels, then pound it in one big gulp like the vile medicine it is. 

2. Get better coffee. One of my wife's goals in life is to collect every type of coffee maker there is, and I've sampled coffee prepared from several different apparatuses. Far and away the best is cold brewed coffee (mentioned in passing at the end of this entry in wife's blog). Water + coffee - heat = really good coffee. No lie, it's not nearly as bitter, it's not sour. Poured over ice it's a refreshing jolt of caffeine in the 10 months of the year that Oklahoma is ridiculously hot. 

So I'm going to be OK this week. And maybe, just maybe, I'll come to permanently appreciate the fact that I can pour a cup of coffee for myself in 5 seconds if I don't have to fiddle with non-dairy creamer powder and those stupid little sticks. 

Only you (and coffee) can prevent office fires.