Saturday, January 01, 2011

A New Year, A New Headache Plan

With the start of a new year, I’ve decided to try something else to try to decrease these headaches.  I’m going on a significant elimination diet.  I’ve tried gluten-free, no MSG, and no chocolate or caffeine diets separately without success.  However, it may be that there may be some food items that are “partial” triggers – by themselves they don’t cause a headache, but several of them together can cause headaches.  I already know that multiple triggers are more likely to give me migraines than a single trigger which is what convinced me that this might be helpful.

So, what am I eliminating?  A better question to ask is what am I allowed to eat!  I figure that if foods are causing problems, my headaches should definitely improve with a couple of weeks on this diet.  If that happens, then I have to do the much more complicated task of sorting out which foods are problematic.  Basically, I can have chicken, white rice, apples, grapes, broccoli, carrots, and a few other veggies.  I’ll also be taking a multivitamin.

I think the worst thing on this diet is going to be boredom.  How many different ways can you cook such a limited kinds of food?  And without things like onion, garlic, and soy sauce?  On the up-side, PWM will be taking care of meals for him and the kids.  At least I won’t be trying to cook food that I can’t eat.

So, it could be an interesting few weeks.  I’ll try to keep the whining to a minimum.  Pray for us.  We’re going to need it!

2 comments:

Kimberly said...

I LOVE rice cooked with chicken broth! I've also cooked rice with raisins and cinnamon---quite good. And what about chicken salad with either apples or grapes? I guess that would mean you would have to either use mayo or plain yogurt though---if you can use honey, mix the mayo w/honey with the chicken/fruit mix---yummy. Hmmmm.....can you use herbs and spices? I think that might be your lifesaver. If you can find chinese five spice powder, you can use that along with a little bit of water to do a stir-fry. And it's SOOOO good. Best of luck! I'm anxious to hear if this works. I'm praying it will!!!! :)

Catherine said...

My problem is that I'm pretty much limited to salt and pepper for the strict part of the diet. The only chicken broth I can use is the stuff that I've made and frozen myself because the canned stuff generally has some additives - although I do want to check labels to see if there's a brand I can use. Garlic isn't on my "no" list, to I might use some of that. I can't use mayo because it has vinegar or lemon juice and I can't have yogurt (no great loss to me!). I was thinking about getting rice cakes, but I'll have to check the labels.

In any case, if I'm a lot better in a couple of weeks then I'll be motivated to continue and deal with the changes to find what I can eat. I really want to go for three or four weeks so I can really know if food issues are a possible trigger. If there's no change by the first of February, I'll be making a run to Dairy Queen!!