The whole concept of migraine triggers is just perfectly suited for making disabled people who are already suffering waste time & energy obsessing over every single thing they do every day, especially their diets, and to then blame themselves for their attack like their problem is a lack of discipline & willpower and not the fact that they have a chronic illness. If you get migraines, that isn't because your lifestyle & diet isn't sufficiently optimized, it's because you have a migraine disorder.
My neurologist didn't waste any time trying to get me to identify triggers and just got me on the right meds as soon as she could and I'm so glad she never made me feel like it was somehow my fault.
I'm now finally on a preventative that works for me & I literally don't do anything differently but I went from having daily migraines to sometimes not having a single one for over a week. I could do & consume every supposed trigger & still not get a migraine, when before the medication, I could do everything "right" every day for a week & still get a migraine every single day.
It's always like it's a medical disorder that causes your body to react badly to certain normal daily things & the goal should be to make it do that less, not to find ways to totally avoid all those normal daily things.
Yeah...they're caused by migraine disorders. Because people without them don't get migraines on a regular basis.
The chocolate advice is probably bullshit too. Unless you specifically identify it as something that makes your migraines worse (unlikely), it's way more likely to just be a common craving people have during the prodrome phase before the pain starts. If it's your body signaling you that it wants chocolate, there's no reason not to eat it.
Also, my neurologist said if you take triptans, take them during the headache phase immediately when it starts, not during the aura.
This isn't just my opinion btw, it's the current state of migraine research that shows that a) evidence for the belief that specific foods can trigger an entire migraine in someone who would've otherwise not had it is just not there and b) people are prone to misidentifying "triggers" and c) some "common triggers" have been shown in research to have protective qualities against migraines in some people and finally, d) the most up to date approach is to, instead of chasing possible triggers, raise your migraine threshold, which for some people can be achieved only with medication, but stuff like exercise & a nutritious diet could possibly also help you become more resistant too, once your threshold has been raised enough that you have the spoons for it, that is.
Learn more about how “triggers” may actually be signs of migraine prodrome and why identifying migraine triggers is not always easy.
Sometimes when people attempt to carefully track and avoid all their triggers, it creates a sense of guilt. When we think about it this way, the burden is on the person with migraine to avoid their triggers, and people may feel that if they experience an attack, it’s because of their own behavior. “Many times it is just the disease,” says Dr. Halker Singh. “This is the unpredictable nature of migraine. I think we carry enough on our shoulders as it is without the added stigma or guilt [around triggers].” Instead, we can shift to a healthier conversation about awareness in migraine management by learning to recognize prodrome symptoms and early signs of a migraine attack. This puts the focus on a deeper, more personalized understanding of each individual’s own unique experience with migraine. “I think making that shift is a little bit freeing and allows us to separate ourselves from migraine,” says Dr. Halker Singh. “My personal relationship with my migraine changes a little bit—I can separate from my own guilt and say, ‘OK, this is happening, what can I do about it?’” This kind of shift enables someone with migraine to focus more on self-care and addressing what their body needs in the moment during an attack.
New research reveals that 82% of suspected migraine triggers may be false. Learn how science is challenging traditional beliefs about migrai
Your diet can sometimes impact your migraine. Learn which foods are suspected triggers and how to adjust what you eat to help prevent or rel
One study compared headache activity between two groups of people living with migraine while they followed different diets. One diet eliminated foods commonly thought to trigger migraine attacks, and the other diet required patients to eat those same foods. Interestingly, headache frequency improved on both diets. This suggests that particular foods are not likely to trigger an attack, but rather that following a consistent, healthy diet may itself be therapeutic. In other words, feeling that you have control over your headaches may improve your headache symptoms. It also suggests that no single food is a trigger for all people living with migraine.
There's lots of people in the tags going well my dad's uncles grandma cut X out of her diet & it cured her migraines.
If you're a chronic migraine haver please please learn to ignore all of that. There's always going to be people claiming that doing keto/paleo/gluten-free or cutting out seed oils/sugar/MSG and taking 15 different supplements cured their chronic illness and migraine is much the same. I'm not saying they're lying, they can absolutely believe that's what happened but it doesn't mean any of that is going to work for you nor do you have to try it.
I had some of my worst most painful headaches while on strong painkillers, at the hospital, eating only bland low sodium vegan hospital food and getting fluids straight into my veins because apparently, the stress of surgery & recovery made my migraine disorder worse. Despite me being on Emgality. That's just what being chronically ill is like sometimes, there's not much you can do. Some of us can't self-optimize ourselves out of it, despite what every armchair neurologist & dietitian seems to think.
Sometimes the stress of constant headaches & migraines is what's causing your migraines because it's an evil disorder.
[Image IDs: Image #1: Tumblr tags reading: at the start of the year we had this lecturer at work on health and safety and stuff, and the dude kept going on abt how migraines are always cause by something and how u cant rly get migraines for no reason, and like.... the 1st thing i got told back when i got diagnosed was that there isnt rly a specific trigger, yeah sure ive made some changes to my diet bc some stuff actively messes with me and also with my digestion at the same time lol, but beyond that ultimately personal choice of mine??, i only got told to take painkillers when ive got an aura and not eat chocolate whilst in a crisis lol
Image #2: Specific foods have often been thought to trigger migraine attacks in the past. For example, some commonly reported migraine triggers included alcohol (especially red wine and beer), chocolate, age cheese, cured meats, smoked fish, yeast extract, food preservatives that contrain nitrates and nitrites, artificial sweetners, and monosodium glutamate (MSG).
However, evidence for foods triggering migraine attacks is actually rare, and doctors now think that many commonly accepted food "triggers" are more likely food cravings experienced during the prodrome phase of an attack. Additionally, it's important to remember that migraine attacks are often due to multiple factors. When you're already stressed, not sleeping well, or not exercising, certain dietary factors may make it more likely to have a migraine attack—but in this case, it is the combination of all of these different things that contribute to the attack, not just one specific food. /End ID]
