Oh gosh, I used to eat massive amounts of chocolate for easter when I was a kid and I would get really sick from it.

In all fairness, this was probably due more to the massive sugar intake than the chocolate. Chocolate is expensive and cheap Easter candy producers probably try to minimize the amount they are actually putting into their candy to control costs.

I made that mistake as a kid. Got a 3-pound bag of Milky Way Dark Minis for Christmas, and I'm sure it was supposed to last me several months, but I went through about half the bag watching TV that afternoon.

The next morning I was so sick I don't have words for how sick I was. Once I finished with the first kind of sick, I still had a pounding headache, acute sensitivity to light and sound, etc.

I described the symptoms to my dad, pleading for help, and his first reaction was "...do you have a hangover?"

Good lord if that's what hangovers are like, why do people drink? To this day, I point to that experience as the reason I've never had more than two alcoholic drinks in a day. I just can't imagine...

Fwiw, high doses of theobromine feel like very high doses of caffeine, but with much more anxiety. So, if you were bouncing off the walls and couldn't sit down or sleep for 24+ hours, that would be theobromine.

My cousine ate a pound of prunes when he was 3 yo. He got a royal diarrhea that day, the damn prunes came out of every hole.

Humans can do it much easier with Caffeine. The pathways are related (and basically swapped between humans and dogs; in theory a dog would experience coffee more like we experience hot chocolate). That's why Four Loko was so dangerous and why a lot of colleges tend to have massive "Caffeine Pill Awareness" campaigns and why college administrators (and psychologists) have sometimes thought that Caffeine in any pill form should be "behind the counter" and somewhat strictly controlled because humans can't be trusted with Caffeine doses in pill form and overdoses are more common than a lot of people think.

Aw jeez seriously? Caffeine pills are helping me kick my Dew habit.

I suppose if the pills go behind the counter I can just get a kilo of the lab-grade powder and portion it out myself... that would actually make it easier than trying to break the pills in half to taper the dose.

> Everything I've read suggests you would be much better off using black coffee to wean from a soda habit, especially if you don't like the taste of black coffee (because it might just wean you off caffeine altogether). The ritual of brewing a cup of coffee (even as simplified as it has gotten with modern single cup machines) is a useful slowdown to measure your doses by.

I find this funny. I don't have a soda habit (I do not enjoy drinking it regularly, but a couple times a month, maybe, is nice) but I drink a lot of black coffee! I love the taste, and even though I grind beans on a per-cup basis, and my kettle takes a while to get hot, and there is some cleanup involved, it doesn't stop me whatsoever. If I didn't like the taste, and needed milk/sugar, maybe things would be a different story...

>> Aw jeez seriously? Caffeine pills are helping me kick my Dew habit.

Not experienced; but isn't that like taking amphetamines to kick a cocaine habit? :/

The pop is caffeine + sugar + flavor

So I'm replacing it with a caffeine pill and flavored water, to get the sugar calories out.

Then later I'll try to reduce the caffeine dose, and/or go to plain tap water.

A caffeine pill is way too much caffeine. A 24oz bottle of dew has like 50mg of caffeine compared to something usually closer to 200mg in those pills.

Consider normal tea, or my SO just recently accidentally found caffeinated sparkling water, which exists somehow

I've got 100mg pills, and dew is 54mg per 12oz can, so one pill replaces two cans, that's great.

I eat more than my fair share of dark chocolate, so I took a look at that. The toxic levels are _a lot_ of chocolate, and I can't even imagine consuming anywhere near the lethal levels.

That said, I think the black licorice case here also falls into the "levels I can't even imagine" category.