I do not have debilitating, world-shattering migraines. I just get headaches. More days than not. I have one right now. My mom once had a headache for an entire year. (This remains a medical mystery.) I have on occasion had headaches that lasted so long that I expected to imitate her, although so far I don’t think I’ve actually broken a full week (with breaks provided by ibuprofen).
Based solely on this description, this sounds like a pretty big deal. It also sounds like the sort of thing that might have a subtle but simple cause, which might be discovered by taking sufficiently detailed notes. I haven’t tried it myself, but I recall seeing references to software for this purpose, which might suggest specific things to investigate as possible causes. Are your headaches by any chance related (positively or negatively) to eating choline? Would you be able to detect if there were other relations of that type?
I tracked my headaches for about a month and a half once and then stopped, but I didn’t correlate it with food (particularly not choline, which I don’t even know what foods it comes in). I haven’t noticed any decisive correlations between various foods and the headaches. I got one yesterday evening (a rare overnighter, which I’m waiting for the ibuprofen to chase away now) and that day I had leftover vegetable strata and juice and toast with hummus and some ice cream, none of which are or contain unusual foods for me.
There’s lots of choline is in meat and eggs, and there’re smaller qantities of it in various other things. I’ve heard of headaches from both too much choline (when taking choline supplements) and too little (especially when taking piracetam, which depletes choline. I take both piracetam and choline citrate). Being a vegetarian is listed as a risk factor for deficiency on the wikipedia page.
That sounds like a worthwhile experiment. I would also suggest keeping a headache log and a food log (there are cell phone apps to make it easy; you photograph things instead of writing them down) and analyzing them after a month or two.
I’ll restart the headache log and combine the food diary. (Is it worth including times of eating various things?) A cell phone app will not help, since I don’t have a cell phone.
Or maybe just one that people don’t talk about much.
I only own a cell phone because I needed a way to have contact with the rest of the world while my internet access was down when I moved a few months ago. I don’t think it’s actually useable at this point—I haven’t added minutes to it for quite a while.
Based solely on this description, this sounds like a pretty big deal. It also sounds like the sort of thing that might have a subtle but simple cause, which might be discovered by taking sufficiently detailed notes. I haven’t tried it myself, but I recall seeing references to software for this purpose, which might suggest specific things to investigate as possible causes. Are your headaches by any chance related (positively or negatively) to eating choline? Would you be able to detect if there were other relations of that type?
I tracked my headaches for about a month and a half once and then stopped, but I didn’t correlate it with food (particularly not choline, which I don’t even know what foods it comes in). I haven’t noticed any decisive correlations between various foods and the headaches. I got one yesterday evening (a rare overnighter, which I’m waiting for the ibuprofen to chase away now) and that day I had leftover vegetable strata and juice and toast with hummus and some ice cream, none of which are or contain unusual foods for me.
There’s lots of choline is in meat and eggs, and there’re smaller qantities of it in various other things. I’ve heard of headaches from both too much choline (when taking choline supplements) and too little (especially when taking piracetam, which depletes choline. I take both piracetam and choline citrate). Being a vegetarian is listed as a risk factor for deficiency on the wikipedia page.
I’ve been eating a lot of eggs lately. Should I try eating eggs every day for a week and then no eggs for a week and see what happens?
That sounds like a worthwhile experiment. I would also suggest keeping a headache log and a food log (there are cell phone apps to make it easy; you photograph things instead of writing them down) and analyzing them after a month or two.
I’ll restart the headache log and combine the food diary. (Is it worth including times of eating various things?) A cell phone app will not help, since I don’t have a cell phone.
Wow. That’s a rather significant divergence from culture! Tim Ferris would be impressed.
Or maybe just one that people don’t talk about much.
I only own a cell phone because I needed a way to have contact with the rest of the world while my internet access was down when I moved a few months ago. I don’t think it’s actually useable at this point—I haven’t added minutes to it for quite a while.
I had a cellphone once for about a week, but then I gave it back.