Dairy causes my migraines. There, I said it. It also causes my blood sugar to be completely wacky. Who knows what other random symptoms it causes, too.
I always thought that butter was my friend, even if I knew I couldn't tolerate cheese, yogurt, and other former lovers. Not so, not so. I finally started to make the connection between butter and my migraines when I tried SCD yogurt again. A half teaspoon of yogurt couldn't possibly hurt, right? Think of all those awesome probiotics!
Unfortunately, I was looking more for GI symptoms as an indicator of whether yogurt was ok, or even brain fog and fatigue. Not migraines. So it took me awhile for it to finally gel.
(A special thanks to Terri at the HSD for mentioning headaches and dairy in the same sentence. I'm forever in your debt!)
I went without any dairy, including butter, for about a week. No migraines. I made some ghee on a Sunday night. Ate it on Monday. Felt weird, like woozy from the blood sugar roller coaster, on Monday night. Migraine aura started Tuesday morning. Sigh.
I hadn't had any migraines for quite awhile until last summer. I had an aura for the first time in years while I was a few months pregnant and hadn't eaten enough that day. I had a few while my daughter was a baby, especially in the hospital and when we first came home, and I attributed those to hormones. And maybe decaf coffee withdrawal. Yes, that really can happen, I promise you. That 3% of leftover caffeine still did a number on me.
They started getting really bad and frequent once I stopped breastfeeding. Again, I thought my hormones were wacky. But it just kept happening, month after month. I felt like I spent every weekend recovering from a horrid headache, many of which started on a Saturday morning. I would get them around my period, but then be baffled when they would randomly start in the middle of the month, too.
It felt a lot like a blood sugar problem. I could usually feel it the night before as I went to bed, and I would go eat a bedtime snack to try and avoid the coming blood sugar crash. It didn't often help. I felt so clueless as to what to do.
I went to the chiropractor weekly. That was affordable... though it did seem to help somewhat.
I tried supplementing magnesium in many forms. Citrate (which seemed to make it much worse), oxide, malate, Epsom salt baths, mag chloride spray. Not all at the same time, of course, I'm not that dumb. (Not like a patient I once had who overdosed on magnesium laxatives and almost killed himself. His wife found him on the floor of the bathroom, bradycardic in the 30s. His potassium level was in the 7s. No one thought to get a mag level til later in the game after I found out he had taken so much, though I wish I could have known what it was! Anywho...)
The mag actually seemed to make the blood sugar part of things even worse. I felt like I had to constantly be eating so that I wouldn't feel lightheaded and weird.
I did notice that I sometimes felt that way after eating peas. Little did I know that it was the BUTTER, not the peas. Sorry, peas, for blaming you.
I miss dairy. But I don't miss having migraines every few days.
Sayonara, butter.
SC
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