When I was a teenager, I once got a migraine headache. It was terrible. Even just barely breathing made my head feel as if my brain was being slammed around inside my skull.
Then nausea set in rather quickly. I ran to the bathroom and threw up. The pain in my head was suddenly gone. I was amazed. I had never been happy about throwing up before. But I was ecstatic. I could not believe how fast the pain went away. It was amazing.
When I was in college, I started cycling. I would ride for hours a day almost every day. Eventually, I was putting more miles on my bike than I was putting on my car each year. But then life happened. I got married, had kids, started traveling more for work, and just did not have as much time to ride. I would still get out for rides a few times a week. And then I started getting headaches associated with bike rides.
These headaches were starting about 2-3 hours after my bike ride. I would get an intense headache. They were not migraines, but they were pretty bad. It got worse. I began suffering from more frequent headaches. Not just after bike rides.
Then something else happened. I have always loved watching movies while eating a big tub of popcorn. I began getting headaches after eating a lot of popcorn.
Because of this, I started looking for other patterns with my headaches. They were there, I just had to look for them. It was food. Sugar was easy to find a problem source. If I ate too much sugar, I would quickly start getting a headache.
I could understand sugar causing headaches. It is generally accepted that too much sugar is bad for us. But there is no sugar in popcorn. So I was baffled by the popcorn headaches, just like I was baffled by the bike ride headaches.
I began paying much closer attention to what I ate in relationship to when I would get headaches. A pattern emerged. This pattern would have been noticeable a lot sooner if I had kept a FoodLog of what I ate & when I got headaches.
The pattern: Eating a significant amount of carbohydrates would cause headaches. But the headaches would come hours later or even up to 2 days later. After continuously eating a significant amount of carbohydrates for 2 days, massive headaches would set in.
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