The Migraine Diet-Part 2

Yesterday I filled you in on our decision to choose alternate methods of treatment-the traditional methods weren't working.  Today I'm going to share with you exactly what our migraine diet is.

Basically, everyone has a threshold for headaches or migraines, and everyone has a different threshold.  The reason we get headaches is because of a trigger.  The trigger can be a food, scent, stress, or other environmental cause.   Getting a headache is kind of like filling a glass of water.  Your headache threshold is the top of the glass, and your trigger is the water.  When you add enough triggers in, the glass will over flow and you will have a headache or migraine.  People that are prone to migraines just have a smaller glass, and it takes fewer triggers to produce a migraine.  To stop migraines from happening, you have to find your triggers and eliminate them.  

The beginning stage of the migraine diet is very restrictive.   You eliminate foods that are known triggers for migraine sufferers.  We eliminated all animal products (milk, butter, cheese, meat, eggs), yeast, nuts, caffeine, artificial preservatives and colors, fermented things, pickled things,  and chocolate.  Basically, it is a whole foods vegan diet. During the restrictive phase of the diet, we also worked at getting Hubbie off of all his medicines.  We did this gradually so as not to shock his system. By eliminating so many things, we were able to determine that diet was the trigger for Hubbie's migraines.  One week after starting the diet, the migraines were gone.  

After you have been on the diet for a while, you can start to introduce foods back into your menu.  I suggest only doing one food at a time so you can see if it is a trigger.  So far we have introduced dairy products, chocolate and yeast.  We found our first trigger when we started eating yeast again.  Every time he ate anything with yeast in it, he got a headache.  Items with yeast are now on our no eat list.  We have not introduced many other things because we are pretty happy with our diet.  It helps us to be creative with menu planning, and we both feel very healthy.  Its a good feeling to know that you aren't putting processed chemicals and preservatives into your body.  We do fudge sometimes on preservatives because it is difficult to eat completely whole, preservative free food all the time.

If you have any other questions about the migraine diet, please leave a comment!  I would love to be able to help anyone else that was in the situation we were in.  I know suffering from migraines or having a loved one that suffers from migraines can be a very difficult situation, and I would love to help anyone that I can.