So I drink coffee, black.
Coffee has become a really different experience without anything added (sugar or creamer).
All of a sudden the roast really matters (I like medium). and the brand really matters.
As for caffeine, this is how I do it: 1 "normal" coffee in the morning, then decaf from then on.
The normal coffee usually tastes better than decaf. (and a bad decaf tastes like bottled cancer - I swear I'm drinking turpentine)
I treat decaf like it's benign but my friends remind me - "decaf does not mean caffeine free".
That said, I think quitting sugar is harder than quitting caffeine.
It is, your intestinal bacteria take that sugar and secrete opioid receptor chemicals - i may be off, but between wheat, sugar, and i think corn your gut bacteria basically control your life.
This is why people crave cake and sweets when they go on a low carb / low calorie diet, it's not because they're hungry, it's because they're changing the other half of their brain chemistry through the destruction of their gut bacteria.
It's not a bad thing to destroy the gut bacteria you don't really want to have so much of.
That said, I would never work as early as 9am if I didn't have to. Caffeine allows me to jumpstart my brain for programming. I need coffee in particular: tea sustains but doesn't jumpstart.
Exercise first thing in the morning can act as a substitute for coffee in getting my brain jumpstarted. While I find it easy to exercise at 6:30-7am in the Summer and Fall, Winter and Spring in southern New England suck. At 6:30am, it's often dark, 10-20F, windy, and damp. It's an area made for depressions. I can't see ever giving up coffee while I live here.
It's important to point out that about every decade you're going to have to adapt your diet and exercise to meet changes in your body. I'm 53 now. When I don't exercise at least 5x/week I start to have sleeping issues. Alcohol affects me more, especially my sleep. Carb bombing happens with a portion of half the amount I could eat 10 years ago. Back to coffee, I have 2 espressos in the morning and, occasionally, one after lunch but never after 2pm. Breaking any of those coffee "rules" causes me hypertension, sleep loss, and/or a sour stomach.
Sorry for the tome. Hopefully some of it is useful.
However, people have wide variations in what they taste (and smell) as pleasurable. Without reading the study, I have a hard time being as binary as "nobody likes the taste of coffee".
In reality I have quit caffeine and gone back to it. I didn't see the same benefits as you. After a few days of adjusting, I felt about the same as before. The only difference was I didn't get to enjoy a morning coffee anymore.
† It probably wasn't really by Mark Twain.
It really helped along with not drinking all the gunk in soda. Since then, I've cut salt intake, sugar binging, and set aside 30 minutes most days to get the heart rate up. I'm no "health nut" but after breaking my sedentary habits, I do feel better than I have in a long time.
What happened for me was winter. I was waking up at 7, running every day in the morning, working on a project before work. Then winter hit and seasonal depression makes it hard.
So now I'm waking up earlier, and doing more work, but I'm using coffee again....
Unfortunately for me, this is a feature.
Even when I go a week to a month without caffeine, I tend to stay up late, but not late enough to get things done.
However, if I drink something caffeinated, then I can turn that into staying up late enough to work while it's quiet, and I become much more productive.
There are other reasons as well, however they are more specific to my personal scenario, and not really generally applicable. If you're curious, I'd be happy to talk about them in some other way, but not in a public forum. (My email is in my bio if anyone's interested.)
The body is too effective at regulating anything that feels good.
We'll see if the trick is to eat healthy and exercise instead of doing neither and then acting like it's the coffee that's going to kill you.
That's intriguing, could you expand on that? What about life is different, nevermind more pleasant, with or without caffeine?
Is there such thing as a good decaf though? All the ones I have ever tried had an horrible chemical-like taste.
I use Campos (in Australia) decaf, though I blend that with their regular blend.
1kg of decaf to 500g of their regular blend, giving me a 1/3 strength that I grind and use in either an aeropress or v60.
I moved to this, as near the start of the lockdown / wfh here I was drinking 4-5 regular aeropresses in a day with the caffeine impacting my sleep.
This new mix is much better - I have my ritual and nice coffee, and i can go off it for days without hitting the withdrawal.
Right now, I’m limiting caffeine intake to a cup each of decaf and low caffeine tea per day.
It hasn’t been too hard to be honest, but maybe the withdrawal symptoms haven’t fully kicked in yet. We’ll see.
This is quite the claim and I do not agree at all. I do not get withdrawal symptoms from caffeine. And I sleep better than basically anyone I know.
For me, 95% of the trick was just finding a good decaf. You can drink lots of decaf (it's got ~5% of the caffeine of a normal cup) as a taper.
I have no discipline of, like, any sort whatsoever, and I don't even remember what quitting was like. I'm sure it's very difficult for lots of people, but just to chime in for the idea that it might not, for you, be nearly as bad as it is for some other people, and if you're interesting in ceasing caffeine, you should just give it a shot.
† Not health! My alcohol and nicotine affinities will attest to how little health has to do with any of this! I literally just mean life is more pleasant without the caffeine.