One message that I receive fairly often on The Dizzy Cook goes something like this – Hello, I’ve been on the Heal Your Headache diet about 2 weeks and I’m not feeling better. Why is my migraine diet not working? If anything, I feel worse. Should I stop? Can you help?! It seems crazy to me that anyone would expect huge changes just two weeks in, but I forget that I used to be one of them. I was about a month or two into the Heal Your Headache diet when I felt frustrated with it as I wasn’t really seeing any noticeable relief. It was difficult to always have…
I Followed a Migraine Elimination Diet: Here’s What Happened
What is an Elimination Diet? Diet affects the frequency and severity of migraine symptoms in some people. The purpose of an elimination diet is to reduce your exposure to controllable triggers. I’m certain you know there are some common triggers that are unavoidable like hormones, weather, sensory stimulus and so on. Yet common food triggers can be avoided in an attempt to reduce our trigger load and to raise our migraine threshold resulting in better control over symptoms for some. There are many elimination diets out there to choose from. Most members of Migraine Strong follow The Heal Your Headache Diet created by David Buchholz or The Charleston Diet…
How to Recognize Migraine Baseline and Reintroduce Foods After an Elimination Diet
The migraine brain is said to be hyper responsive to its surrounding environment. We respond with migraine attacks to things that people without migraine wouldn’t react to at all. The Bucket Theory was developed as a way to explain how difficult to control triggers (like hormones, stress and weather) fill up a portion of our bucket each day. While these triggers are hard to manage, the ones that we have some control over are the ones that we eat and drink each day. What Is An Elimination Diet? An elimination diet is a short term modification of diet that allows us to remove the ‘commonly known’ migraine triggers. These triggers…
Diet – Show Me the Science!
You know what used to really irk me? When people would say, “there is no science to support changing your diet to help reduce migraine.” It doesn’t bother me much anymore as I have experienced the powerful effect of diet for myself as well as witnessed countless examples of diet helping people get significantly better. As a licensed professional (registered dietitian), I pride myself on only using evidence-based approaches to help people, but there are few studies to point to and say “A-ha!” I’m bummed that I have no solid response to the demand, “show me the science!” but I don’t let it get to me anymore. Diet Studies So,…
My Journey with Vestibular Migraine
I was 30 years old and on top of the world when I became completely debilitated by vestibular migraine. Just returning from a trip to Asia and getting back to work, I was barely sleeping and stressed out. I had been working really hard for the past year to get promoted to a senior product manager at a large watch company. Although I was exhausted, I couldn’t miss any more days so I powered through even when I wasn’t feeling well. I had mild dizziness, a fuzziness in my head, but it was more annoying than debilitating. First I tried my primary care doctor, who just said it was a…
Coffee: Friend or Foe? Caffeine and Migraine
Updated July 2020. This is one of the most common questions people ask me. In general, caffeine helps the average person with headaches and occasional migraine attacks. They may enjoy a rich cup of coffee each morning to get things going as well as an afternoon pick-me-up. And, some people love to relax after a nice dinner and sip an espresso, cappuccino or cup of decaf. They may notice that their occasional tension headache or even migraine attack vanishes after enjoying a strong cup of coffee. Caffeine and migraine is often a hotly debated topic. How Caffeine Works Caffeine acts to constrict blood vessels and speed everything up. It is…
