coffee, tea or me?

"Coffee, tea or me?" photo by Gina Matchinsky.
One of the art pieces from the 2013 Des Moines Arts Festival

January 15, 2014 question is: "On the scale of 1 to 10, how was your lunch today?"

After sleeping 4:30am already the day before, this morning I woke up 8:30am. Just 4 hours of sleep and my regular sleep hours is 8. I just straightened up stuffs around the house for a bit, had my usual Kellog's cornflakes breakfast and then proceeded writing my story for yesterday's post.

It was around 11:30am when I finished and I still needed to prepare myself for a visit to a friend's house so I just drank tea and took a bath, then called some people and then finish my final preparation routine in time for me to get picked up and delivered to my destination. My next food intake was half a Hershey bar eaten inside the car on the way to a friend. So for lunch time it was just tea.

Between drinking tea or coffee, I prefer tea. I guess it is the aftertaste of coffee that I don't like much. It is something warm to drink that I very much appreciate on a cold winter day. You feel warm inside and cleansed and light after a drink.

My love for tea started when I first got pregnant with my eldest daughter. It was a NO NO to take medication for diarrhea when one is pregnant and my tummy often has a hard time digesting food I ate resulting to tummy trouble. A friend told me to drink tea with sugar and to my surprise that always did the trick! No need to take Diatabs or Imodium or Alka Seltzer. Just around 2 cups of tea with sugar and I'm fine.

Another incident that tea helped was when I had my ulcers or bouts of hyperacidity. I just eat crackers, my most favorite brand is Sky Flakes, drink my Lipton tea with sugar and that relieves the stomach pain and stops me from going to the restroom a lot.

When I have a fever, a nice warm tea with honey can help me sweat to keep the temperature low, too.

On long trips and when I am not quite sure if the food there will agree with my tummy, I always order iced tea just to make sure that whatever it is that might cause problem will already get stopped from developing.

When I was in the Philippines, I used to drink a variety of Twinings tea. The nice thing about it is they come in different flavors. I tried the Chamomile, Earl Grey, Green Tea, Black Tea, Irish Breakfast, Cinnamon, Cranberry, Blueberry, Raspberry and many others. But nothing beats my honest-to-goodness, 100% Natural Lipton tea that is my tummy trouble one-man-band cure.

So on the scale of 1 to 10 and 10 being the top score, on a cold winter day with not much activity and needing to diet and had to go out, I would rate my tea lunch, 10 for being just what I needed at the time.