Pleased with my progress but headaches getting me down

TeresaTT

Full Member
I am so happy that I've lost 8.5lb in five weeks and I am really enjoying this diet. However, after five weeks of healthy eating and cooking all my meals from scratch, I still get headaches. I have suffered from migraines for several years now and there are many things that trigger them, most of them being certain foods and worst of all - alcohol.

Ready meals on a regular basis triggered a migraine so I thought that with healthy eating home cooked food I'd suffer less. However I've been waking up with headaches every now and then that haven't turned into full migraines but have been with me all day. Normal headache/migraine remedies don't help much and I don't want to waste one of my prescribed migraine tablets as I only get six per prescription and they are probably quite nasty. However they will stop a full migraine dead in its tracks (after an hour and a half).

The common food between my last two headaches is scan bran. I don't see how I could be sensitive to scan bran and I really enjoyed the curly wurly cake and ferrero rocher that I made with it. However, I think that I will have to try scan bran again in a few days and see if I get a headache again, in which case I'll have to avoid it.

Sorry about this long post but I just wanted a moan as normally I've been feeling so good with all this healthy eating, but these headaches really get me down. I don't want anything getting in the way of my focus on succeeding with this diet.

If I keep getting them, I will see my doctor but they normally just want to give me more drugs. I've been on beta blockers which didn't help and then they wanted to give me epileptics medication which I refused. I hate taking drugs as there are always bad side effects. Doctors don't have time to analyse lifestyles and look for causes, they just dish out drugs.

Thanks for listening,

Teresa
 
Hi, honey.
I was alway's getting headaches, before joining SW. Some of them were ful blown migraines, but most were more "ordinary" ones.
But they have got fewer since I started, and now I "only" get them about twice a week.
Hopefully yours will calm down soon, too.
 
Oh that's awful. I'm sorry you have to put up with this.

One question.. you've probably already thought of this, but are you drinking enough water? The reason I ask, is that I often get headaches when I'm a bit de-hydrated. So I drink loads of water and it happens less often.

Could you try making the curly wurly cake with weetabix instead of scan bran. I make the ferrero rocher with weetabix instead of scan bran and I think they're much nicer to be honest. You can still have your cake and eat it ;) (sorry LOL bad pun)
 
Hi Teresa,
Sorry you are having a rough time of it but very well done on your weight loss.
I suffered from headaches badly and they did take time to sort themselves out, however, bran is a known trigger for migraine (well known to my family anyway! bran based cereals sets my mum off) so be careful with the scan!

Funny, but now, if I have an indulgent day/weekend/holiday that's when i get the banging headaches!!

Good luck and I hope you feel better soon.
Jaylou xx
 
Sorry to hear that they're being so disruptive! I think you're doing the right thing by trying the scan bran one more time to see if it makes a difference, but Annie is right in that you should also make sure you're drinking enough - dehydration gives you that kind of headache that just won't go away.

I understand your reluctance to take medication because of the side effects, but sometimes it's the lesser of two evils - some side effects in exchange for curing your problem or at least reducing the symptoms.

Also, once the doctors can find a type of medication that works, they can change which drug they prescribe to minimise the side effects. Please don't write off drugs in general - I know they're maybe not ideal, but if they can get you past this, they might just be worth it.

Just my 2p!
 
Thanks for the replies. That's a very good tip about using wheetabix instead. Sometimes I just need a fix of something cakey. I have been trying to drink more water so I'll try to make sure I drink enough.

I'm going to try to get more positive and pull myself out of the dumps despite this headache I've got today. I've planned some nice meals for the next few days and I've stocked up on loads of gorgeous fruit to snack on. I'm also going out for a meal tomorrow night with my friends. I'm really looking forward to it, but it's my first meal out since I started SW. I'm going to try really hard to pick things with the least syn values but might treat myself to a dessert. I'll be driving so I won't have to save any syns for alcohol.

Thanks for the support, I feel a bit better now.

Teresa
 
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