Fix My Head

I take an iron pill and a vitamin D pill every day except when I forget. I had blood tests to check up on my iron a few months ago; they were fine.

So no standard multivitamin? Have you at least tried taking one for a week and seeing if it makes a difference?

I don't think I've had a glucose test.

You can buy HbA1c test kits over the counter for ~$30 at most pharmacies. (HbA1c is a 30-ish-day average of your blood sugar concentration. It detects diabetes (high) and hypoglycemia (low).)

I would be more open to switching to a low carb diet if anyone could name something that crunches the way toast does.

Surely you can tolerate any diet, no matter how untasty, for long enough (2 weeks) to find out whether it gets rid of your headaches.

One more hypothesis: celiac disease (aka gluten intolerance). This study says that conditional on being in a high-risk group that you're in (because of the iron-deficiency anemia, which celiac disease causes), its prevalence is 9.6%. Update up for having other symptoms in need of explanation, down for not having unexplained weight loss. It that were it, then avoiding gluten for awhile would get rid of the headaches and other bad things.

Low carb is a relative thing.

Looking over your diet you seem to eat very little, for which I have a bit of jealousy--if I tried to eat like that my headaches would be from transitioning in and out of ketosis (I get mild headaches when I don't eat enough, and on fasting days they are most annoying) and you only eat meat (usually in the form of seafood) every other day or once every three or four days.

As I don't know you well, I wonder if this is circumstance (you're in depressed economic circumstances), or if this is a choice? I remember (but could be wrong) that you're somewhere out there on the Autism Spectrum, and many folks with ASD have food "issues" of one kind or another.

Either way, the concept of a low carb diet can either be targeting a specific and low amount of carbs a day, or it can be looking at the total energy balance consumed--to pull an example out of the air 20% carbs, 40% protein, 40% fats. Looking at what you've posted, and without actually doing the math I think that you're probably more around 10-20 percent protein, 60-70 percent sugars and carbs (you eat a good bit of fruit, but that's mostly fructose and glucose, not the longer chain starches) and the balance protein. I don't think this is a very healthy balance, but others with as much or more knowledge disagree. Whatever.

Either way it doesn't mean you can't eat crunchy stuff like pretzels or potato chips, it just means when you do you have to cut something else, or increase other things (diet, fats, proteins) to compensate. I guess if you eat a horrendously strict low carb diet those things are out, but this is more about goals than religion, no?

Given your current diet it may be enough to simply add calories and if you then start to see unhappy body-shape consequences modulate overall diet and exercise to adjust. As an example eat a 1/2 pound of chicken breast, a 8 ounce pork or beef steak, salmon and some other fish in comparable quantities every day. This will up your protein, and if you can find good pastured/grazed cattle and pork will increase your omega-3 intake and other essential fatty acids.

My two biggest downfalls where low-carb and gluten free is concerned is Pizza and Pretzels. Oh, and ice cream. The ice cream here in AUS is still made with real sugar and real cream. Even the stuff in the little stop-and-robs. Oh Man.

Pizza we tried to work around by accepting that it's not going to be "low carb" in that sense and restricting it to once a week. Gluten free we tried to solve by finding a gluten free pizza dough recipe.

That didn't go so well, so we're back to flour based pizza dough. Pretzels I can usually avoid, but they're in the junk food machines at work (the facility I work in is about 20 miles from the nearest other source of food in a secure building with armed guard etc. etc., so you pretty much either bring your own food or eat in the cafeteria) so I occasionally succumb to temptation. So what--the point isn't to be a purist, the point is to achieve specific goals, and with my waist the smallest it's been since 2000, I'm ok with falling off the wagon every so often.

The point is that if you can modify your diet enough to reduce the frequency and severity of headaches, it's an overall win right?

So there are two things wrong with wheat based grains. One is the gluten, which can cause Celiac or celiac-like responses, and the other is phytic acid. Now, there's a lot of BS on the net about foods and health, so I'm always skeptical about stuff like this but it seems that phytic acid reduces mineral (including iron) and vitamin absorption in the gut. There are two ways to get rid of phytic acid--soaking/fermenting, and avoidance. Breads and dough based foods made with long-rise yeasts will have less phytic acid than short rise yeasts. Beans soaked for 12-24 hours will have lower phytic acid than those soaked for shorter periods of times etc. etc.

Your diet doesn't appear to be horribly heavy in wheat based stuff, but you were diagnosed with iron deficiencies, so this plus some steak/beef if your dietary preferences allow it may help.

To more narrowing focus on the crunch part, once you address your overall energy budget and eliminate gluten from it, there are some things you can do to get the crunchy back in.

1) Rice based bread. Carb heavy, but gluten free. The stuff I got at Trader Joes was a rather dense bread and bit on the moist side for good toasting, but you might have some luck with it.

2) You're across the harbor from S.F.. Sourdough bread HAS to be done with a long-fermentation process (long enough to reduce the phytic acid content significantly) SF is the sourdough bread capital of the world.

3) Rice cakes. Yeah, the crunch isn't as good as crackers or toast, but it's there.

4) Sourdough crackers. Crackers tend to have a bit less overall sugar/carbs in them than bread, and sourdough crackers with cream cheese and smoked salmon is a marvelous breakfast.

Oh, that reminds me. One way of altering your energy/protein balance is to simply drink a protein drink/shake every morning and evening. I have been getting 5 pound bags of this http://www.trueprotein.com/Product_Details.aspx?cid=46&pid=536 and mixing 2 scoops with 16oz of water for breakfast every morning. The plain unsweetened stuff is like weak milk, which I don't care for, but can swallow. The unsweetened chocolate is much more palatable. I'd guess that with 2 scoops a day 2 pounds would last me a month. I bought 10 pounds last order, but just to see if you can stomach it 1 pound ought to get you along the way. Just to add--no financial interest on my part, yadda yadda.

One other thing to look for--and this may have come up before or later in the thread. Some folks are particularly sensitive to different preservatives, to caffeine or other stimulants etc.. Your food diary, while much more accurate than I could generate over that same time, lacks the sort of minute specificity that would let a doctor or a someone with far more knowledge than I pick out the one or two chemicals that are fucking with you.

I routinely get headaches of various kinds, some due to "whiplash" when I was 19, some due to swelling of the sinuses (some due to infections, some not) and finally I wake up most days with a mild headache (sort of like you describe where moving the head increases the pain, but lying there doesn't make it go away). Usually it will subside if I get up and get through the initial pain, but some days that's damn hard to do.

Good luck.

I would be more open to switching to a low carb diet if anyone could name something that crunches the way toast does.

Celery?

something that crunches the way toast does.

Bacon on paper towelling (to soak away grease) in a microwave until it's cooked is crunchy, but not quite the way toast is.

Also it's bacon, so it's probably sufficiently different from toast that texture is overwhelmed.

Since you have supplied a probability, want to bet?

Okay. I'll accept any bet that gives me better than 1:3 odds, up to a maximum risk of $100.

Please don't set up a perverse incentive to misdiagnose yourself, though.

I suggest the Cyrex labs tests. Gluten sensitivity testing is tricky.
Also, if you are not already taking Vitamin D, I'll bet you are deficient.

I haven't looked at Alicorn's data, but when I get a headache my first two hypotheses are that its caused by either dehydration or caffeine withdrawal. Either I drink something caffeinated or drink about 16-24 fluid ounces of water and then re-assess after about 20 minutes. If whichever I tried doesn't work then I do the other thing plus take a pain killer (choosing between aspirin, acetaminophen, or ibuprofen based on other considerations) because by that point I just want the problem to go away rather than to gain a bit of information about which particular solution fixed things. Usually, my first experiment works and no pain pill is required.

Caffeine is a diuretic (meaning it makes you pee) meaning you have to drink more than otherwise in the long run to balance this effect.

Something potentially worth noting if you're drinking a lot of green tea is that its cancer preventing effects appear to follow a dose response curve that has been experimentally observed up to six or seven cups a day, so drinking a lot of it can be worthwhile if that's important to you. Green tea's cancer-protecting mechanism is probably a body-wide up-regulation of apoptosis (programmed cell death) killing potentially cancerous cells earlier than otherwise. One minor worry with this (that I've never seen addressed in the literature which is more of an untrustworthy pet theory of mine) is that apoptosis up-regulation can presumably cause more neurons to die and apoptosis inhibiting mutations like BRCA1 have been suggested as leading to higher IQ. My guess is that there may be a trade-off here between raw biological longevity and high fluid intelligence.

For my body, three liters a day counts as 'a lot', but I work heavily as well. It's also a 'goal level' for work out periods, so it's factored to keep in mind the fact that I don't naturally want to drink that much. (Eg, that level is designed to buffer for the days I may forget or fail to do so)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water :

In the US, the reference daily intake (RDI) for water is 3.7 litres per day (l/day) for human males older than 18, and 2.7 l/day for human females older than 18[7]

Either they are very large glasses, or you are not drinking even close to an appropriate amount of water.

As a frequent sufferer of headaches, the only over-the-counter medication that works really well for my headaches are the Excedrin formulations that include acetaminophen, aspirin and caffeine. Each of those ingredients alone is nowhere near as effective in my experience as the combination.

No-Doz is inexpensive, just caffeine, more convenient to prepare, and easier to take than caffeine powder, if the powder route proves too much of a trivial inconvenience.

I think there is caffeine powder in the house somewhere, so if the answer is "mix X milligrams caffeine powder in with Y compatible liquid" I can possibly do that

I believe anhydrous caffeine powder, as the name indicates, dissolves nicely into water. (I seem to recall this being the case for me, although I cannot test it now since I long ago turned all the caffeine powder into pills.)

I use to get migraines. Now when I go out, I wear good sunglasses. The headaches went away.

None from personal experience, but I was thinking of Seth Roberts' reports about migraine-sufferers identifying some triggers (e.g. fabric softener!)

Obvious things that can be manipulated to probably cause headaches: noise, stress, erratic sleep, physical exertion, dehydration*, allergies, altitude (obviously you're not likely varying your altitude, and most people adjust to any reasonable <7000 ft level), reduction in caffeine, alcohol (and also sulfites in wine) - you're probably considering the last two under 'diet'.

[ * ] I guess I have personal experience nearly fainting from without-noticing-I'm-thirsty dehydration; never a severe headache I'd associate with dehydration without also enough exposure for a nice full body sunburn.

I was trying to decide whether to supplement lipoic acid, and happened to notice convincing evidence that for migraine sufferers, LA supplementation definitely reduces both migraines and regular headaches. (600mg/day, which is not an extremely high dose)

http://quantifiedself.com/migraine/ http://blog.sethroberts.net/2008/10/10/a-new-way-to-prevent-migraines/ http://boingboing.net/2011/07/25/finding-the-source-of-migraines-and-fifty-useless-migraine-drugs.html

ETA: Just saw Jonathan_Graehl replied with similar info further down. Possibly no new information in these links.

So, no migraine, and since you even get headaches when avoiding histaminrich food and should'nt, that gets a low prior. Just for the sake of completeness, illness when moving the head is for me a sure sign that I am severly dehydrated. This seems not to be the case with you.

It's available in capsule form.

You could grind seeds in a coffee grinder, as BillyOblivion suggests. (I don't because the extra stuff in seeds disagrees with another body issue of mine.) Sometimes I take around 5 gelcaps a day while traveling, which isn't as effective but makes most of the difference for the headaches.

What I do is put on a swimmer's nose clip, drink the oil by alternately taking in a mouthful of water and floating a swallow of oil down on top of that; follow up with a banana or something because I've found taking it on an empty stomach to disagree with me; have a bit more water; then take off the noseclip. The clip is mainly to help with Shangri-La appetite control, which I consider just a bonus.

The first time I took this it gave me heartburn -- starting with a smaller amount the first couple of times might be smart.

You can get flaxseed in, well, seed form and mix it into salads and other foods.

It's kinda like sunflower seeds, only a lot smaller.

I'd recommend flaxseed oil even without headaches. It's done some cool stuff for me.

Barleans makes some flavored flax seed emulsion that is surprisingly palatable (this stuff). Gel caps are another option, but a tablespoon is roughly a dozen gel caps.

I tried drinking olive oil a couple times and felt like puking too. Flaxseed oil doesn't do that to me, even 4 tablespoons at a time.

Perhaps. Allergies change naturally over time. I certainly wasn't getting these headaches when I was 11 or 12.

Regardless of whether these are necessarily allergy headaches, they do sound like they're caused by sinus inflammation, and Zyrtek and other antihistamines treat this inflammation directly. I keep recommending Zyrtek because I found it to have no consequential negative side effects.

albeit for headache-unrelated reasons; this was an attempt to track down another problem that remains a mystery

If you don't mind my asking, what was the problem? If you want a diagnosis for your headaches, then every scrap of medical data, especially other unexplained problems, is potentially related and useful.

Scratch tests have a fairly substantial miss rate. If you have actual suspicions about something specific you might be allergic to, it's better to have a blood test. They probably won't offer an across-the-board blood test, though.

How many hours of sleep do you usually get in a night?

Two packets of salty crisps. (Do Americans call crisps "chips"? I refer to the thin planar slices of potato, not the thicker cuboid slices of potatoes also know as "fries".)

If by any chance you are allergic to dust mites, they're basically everywhere. :)

If your symptoms get worse in humid weather (which dust mites apparently prefer), I'd count that as slight evidence for an allergic origin.

When I have a headache, I use aspirin or some type of Indica blend with water based on where my tolerance is at and I don't recall the last time a headaches persisted for longer than an hour.

That being said, mind altering substances are always a risk. All the scientific studies i rely on source from erowid.org or wikipedia and heavily support the theory that cannabis is safe in vapor and edible form and is one of the best general analgesics.

Among stoners "THC" is often called the "Total Headache Cure". It's not really, but it will help with some symptoms of tension/stress headaches (reduces tension, duh.) and with migraines it would reduce the nausea.

edited to add:

"often" might be an overstatement.

I haven't. The headaches aren't enough to keep me from doing most things I'd ever actually want to do, usually, and my dad who is a doctor doesn't seem to find them concerning.

Your father is a doctor and he's let this go on for your entire life!? And also failed to notice the pica thing? If he's never spent a solid work-week doing tests on you, then he is a bad parent. Unfortunately, it sounds like he's also too incompetent as a doctor to actually diagnose you. But you should at least be able to get free blood tests out of him - and I think you need quite a lot of those.

Thanks for correcting my misconception.

Exercise has so many benefits, it's hard for me to think of cases where it isn't a positive trade. Increased agility and strength (..depending, hiking's good), reduced mortality, at least in my case I think better with regular exercise, more energy overall..

I don't consider myself an exercise maniac, but I do layout my vacations such that I can go hiking. It's just plain enjoyable, especially with family.

As for your headaches.. thinking about it, it sounds like you're indoor a lot. It may be a reaction to low oxygen content or generally bad air; have you tried just going outside when one starts? You don't need to exercise, just.. sit outside. Though the benefit is questionable if you live in a city.

If you have a friend or associate really work that area does the pain lessen during the stimulation, only to crash back down once they let go?

I usually associate headaches that start at the base of my skull with tension/stress headaches (and stress can be generated a lot of ways) and with the whiplash I got back in the 80s. Oh, and smoking probably didn't do my neck any good (the nicotine seems to reduce blood flow into the spinal cartilage, especially in the neck).

These would be most effected by the "THC" cure noted above (probably illegal), and/or by doing stuff to reduce stress over time (sex/masturbation to orgasm, hard exercise (did you ever get access to a swimming pool?) on a regular basis etc. etc.. Yoga and/or Feldenkris might also help. These things are preventative, not curative, so you'd have to look at what didn't happen rather than attempt to apply them afterwards. Although I guess there's no downside to getting yourself off after the headache starts, if it helps in the end.

You mentioned "above" that going to the doctor would be expensive and time consuming. Are you under 26?

I am specifically talking about allergy, which is indeed completely unrelated to lactose intolerance, and are said to be very common, but that generally symptoms of the allergy are so weak that you can ignore them.

"A group of phosphoproteins in milk are commonly referred to as “casein”. Casein, which comprises 78.7% of all the protein in milk, is a major trigger of migraines and other types of headaches." http://www.metabolism.com/2008/08/23/stress-foods-food-additives-hormones-initiate-headaches