Caffeine Overdosing and Personal Anecdotes

Well, I'll tell you another story, something, again, dumb shit I've done to myself with nutrition. So there was some research that came out that showed that performance gains from caffeine, six to nine milligrams per kilogram. And at the time, I was probably about 110 kilograms. Whoa. I had, yeah, that's it. So you're talking about a thousand milligrams? Yeah, about a thousand, 1100, somewhere around there, right? So I tried six grams for six milligrams per kilogram. That works really well. I thought you said six grams. You took six grams. No, no. But yeah. So the story, when I tell you, you're going to, you guys are going to freak out at what I did to myself. So, you know, we were taking high dose and the 600 milligrams of caffeine, totally fine. As long as you're going to work out 900, you get quite a bit nauseous. And then if you take it and don't work out, you get super ridiculously sick. Yeah. But one day I put 15 pills of beta alanine in one pocket, and I put 15 pills of a supplement that had 225 milligrams of caffeine per pill in the other. And so they both looked the same. And so I was working. I said, okay, I'll take the beta alanine, and when I feel this tingle start to work, then I'll pop a couple of these. I'll pop like two or three of these other ones, and I'll go to the gym. But I forgot which pocket they were in. And I ended up taking 15 pills with 225 milligrams of caffeine in them. And so I was banging out emails. About 45 minutes later, I'm like, I should be tingling by now. I don't understand what's going on. And then I realized my heart rate was like 140, 150. And I started freaking out. And I realized what I had done. And I went on like this huge four speed walk because I kept thinking if I stop walking I going to have a heart attack And I ended up eating an entire tub of powdered vitamin C just trying to neutralize it What does the vitamin C do? Well, it breaks down catecholamines, right? So it helps to neutralize a lot of that. And normally, you know, you eat five, six, seven grams of vitamin C, you're going to get disaster pants. I ate the entire bottle. Wow. Oh, man. It did nothing. No disaster pants. No disaster pants. Yeah. The little green apple splatters in your underwear. Would you be looking at taking taurine as well too, just to protect the heart? Yeah, but I didn't have any. Right. You know, it wasn't soon after that I started having panic attacks and I didn't realize what it was. And it was, I had depleted all my taurine. And it's almost like a post-traumatic stress disorder. You actually set your cortisol levels so high that you become resistant to normal levels. Well, it's not switching stuff off. You've got to remember caffeine blocks adenosine. That's how it works. So really, adenosine regulates you. So you don't want to block too much of that. Adenosine from adenosine dye and triphosphate? Yeah, the same thing. But adenosine is a sedative neurotransmitter as well. I don't want to get too nerdy with this. Adenosine by itself. Right. So adenosine, you can prescribe it in hospitals for people having acute MIs and that sort of stuff. So adenosine is a molecule that calms you down, helps you sleep, for example. And if you block that with caffeine, you wake up more. But taking, I'm just doing math, three grams of it. Half-life. Okay, let's do it. Half-life for three hours. Your average coffee is what, 80 milliliters? 75 milligrams in a cup of coffee in a weak cup of green tea, a normal one-server coffee. Your Starbucks venti, the big buckets from Starbucks, are 500 milligrams of caffeine. So we're looking at you probably having, what, three of those ventis ingested immediately. Well, it's actually six. Six. Wow. See, I suck at maths, but I... That's not the only thing you suck at. Yeah. Just ask John. But, you know, the caffeine with its half-life of three hours, it's going to be hanging around a lot. And even if half of it's gone, you've still got a gram and a half. The highest I've ever seen done in the medical studies is 500 milligrams, and that's for treatment with severe Alzheimer's. That's nothing. They should just go down to Starbucks and get a Vento. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's what they're doing, unstudied. And those people do it multiple times a day. Those drinks, you know, the Rockstar drinks and the Monster drinks, I think they've got, you know, some have got 150, some have got 250 milligrams per can, and they load them up with taurine by two grams.