Discover the 3-step system to heal headaches

Eliminating Dietary Triggers
Everyone’s different, and it may be that not every one of the foods and beverages that most commonly cause headaches is a trigger for you, but the items that appear in Table 6 (pages 74-75) are the common culprits. You can begin to take control of your headaches by eliminating each and every one of these potential triggers from your diet. (Later, you may be able to reintroduce some of these foods and beverages, as I’ll explain, but for now strict compliance is required.)

The better you follow the diet, the more likely you are to achieve headache control, and the less likely it is that you will require preventive medication—or the less preventive medication you will require—in order to achieve headache control. No one can follow the diet perfectly, but do your best. Each dietary trigger you avoid, thereby removing it from your stack of triggers, reduces your total trigger level and increases the likelihood that you can keep the level below your threshold. Remember, since there are so many triggers that are unavoidable, or difficult or undesirable to avoid (see Table 5, page 62), it is all the more important to eliminate the potent but generally unrecognized triggers that you can avoid readily: the dietary items (and medications) detailed in this chapter.

The diet is a tool. The more skillfully you use any tool, the better it will function. The better you use this tool, the diet, the more effective it will be in controlling your headaches. If your goal is to control your headaches—and take as little medication as possible—the diet is the most valuable tool you have.

You might criticize the diet for its “negative” approach, and it’s true that it focuses on what you cannot eat and drink rather than on what you can. But the number of items you are allowed to eat and drink is much greater than what you’re not, and listing them would require too much space. And just in case you need some help, you’ll find some sample menus and recipes and other dietary tips in the Appendix. (Don’t be constrained by these suggestions; they’re just examples to get you started.)

The diet can be tough to follow initially, especially for vegetarians and others on already restricted diets, but it is not a life sentence of culinary deprivation. Cheer up: you can look forward to a time when your headaches have been controlled well enough, long enough that you can afford to rock the boat by carefully experimenting with dietary liberalization. It’s likely that eventually you can tolerate some of the initially restricted items, at least in limited quantities. But at the start you must strictly avoid all potential dietary triggers. Dietary liberalization comes only after you have achieved headache control and maintained it for four months or more. The details of how you can attempt to reintroduce items will be spelled out later in this chapter.

Excerpted from “Heal Your Headache: The 1-2-3 Program for Taking Charge of Your Pain” by David Buchholz. Copyright 2007 David Buchholz. Reprinted with permission of Workman Publishing. All rights reserved.

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