🫖 Change your tea, change your life

Book of TREE 1.94

In 1993, I visited Wales and discovered tea. Before Wales, I knew about horrible herbal tea my mom drank and Snapple iced tea, neither of which are actually tea. My end of day snack during that visit was a digestive biscuit topped with cream cheese and lemon curd and tea with milk and two sugars. It changed my life.

By the late 00s, I was living in Wales and drinking 5–6 cups of tea with one sugar every day. I did some math and realised that was a lot of sugar and probably had something to do with the extra weight I was carrying. I cut down to half a sugar for a week or so, then ditched the sugar altogether. Once I got used to it, the tea tasted so much better. This encouraged me to cut out other sources of sugar. I started running, I lost weight.

In the mid 10s, I was suffering from anxiety. It occurred to me that the caffeine in the 5–6 cups of tea plus a coffee wasn’t helping me be chill. I tried decaffeinated tea. It was gross. Then I tried Tesco Finest decaffeinated Earl Grey tea. OMG, so good. It helped reduce my anxiety and, bonus, I stopped having a major mid-afternoon energy slump. (Update: I live closer to Sainsbury’s now. Their decaf Earl Grey is just as good. Clipper’s regular decaf tea is just as good as normal tea, but it’s expensive.)

In the late 10s I wanted to become a vegan, I started by trying to figure out my tea. I tried all the plant milks available. Soy is gross. Hemp is gross. Almond is gross. Oat is amazing – better than cow (as long as it’s Oatly or Aldi’s or Lidl’s own brands). Once I sorted tea, I knew I could give up milk, cheese and butter.

In 2022 I started cutting down on ultra-processed food (because it’s addictive and poisonous). The first thing I did was swap oat milk in my Tesco Finest decaffeinated Earl Grey tea for a squeeze of lemon juice. I liked it for a while but soon realised I prefer my tea with creamy oat milk to acidic lemon. I went back to the oat milk but cut down on the cups of tea. Now I have 1–3 per day. I’ve cut down on a lot of other UPFs too.

If you want to make a big change in your life, try starting with a small, easy habitual thing you do every day.

The Smoke Detector Playlist might only contain yesterday’s and today’s songs. It would still be a great playlist.

Grow slowly
Jeff