Anyway….. in my quest to bring you drug-free approaches to migraine relief that you may not have come across before, here’s an article about migraine and acupressure.  In fact as well as explaining more about acupressure, it details three acupressure points specifically helpful in migraine.

As a self-help tool, acupressure really is something worth looking into, so head on over to the article and do let me know in the comments form if you find this a helpful approach.

So for example, if you were aware that the weather conditions were high-risk for migraine, you would minimize other risk factors by making sure you have plenty of sleep, regular food and being sure to avoid any suspect foods.

The site also assesses the risk for other health conditions: arthritis and sinus. It’s an interesting site. Bookmark it to make regular checkups, particularly if you’re traveling away from home and need to check the weather at your destination.

Your problem may not become obvious unless you are keeping a food diary, that can help you uncover patterns in your diet that you may not previously have suspected.

Although the context of slimming is probably where most people will have first encountered this tool, it would be a mistake to think of a food diary as just relevant for weight loss. If you have any condition that can be triggered by food (such as migraine or IBS) you will find it invaluable to keep a record of your day to day food intake, at least for three weeks.

Check out this blog article on using a food diary for healthy eating, but as you read it, think of it in relation to your migraines.  Possible applications of a food diary to preventing migraine could be:

• Use it to check out if you are eating foods that could cause high/low blood sugar swings.
• Are you may eating regularly enough?
• You may have an unsuspected dietary trigger that only surfaces when you look at a food diary in conjunction with a record of when your migraines happen.

The blog article suggested above gives tips on keeping a food diary that are mainly relevant for weight loss. I have suggested ways for you to adapt your thinking towards migraine. But even if you don’t discover any migraine related problems, you might be surprised at other eating patterns that emerge when you study it. After all, a healthy diet is one of the key-stones of a healthy, migraine-free life.

One 19 year old reader (Sally – name changed to protect client anonymity) contacted me to tell me that she’d been baffled by the migraines she had been getting for as long as she could remember. Her Mum was a migraine sufferer and had discovered that hers were coming from spicy foods and chocolate. However Sally can eat all those things without getting any problem.

After some excellent detective work, Sally discovered that on eating certain cereal based foods and pies she always get a headache but didn’t when she excluded those foods. Reading the ingredients in both foods one common ingredient was corn starch.

Sally checked all her food to see what had corn starch in them, and found out pretty much everything contained starch. She says: “I don’t know any foods to eat without corn starch, and without cutting out half my diet.  I am petite and also trying to gain weight. How am I suppose to do that when I have to cut out pretty much all my food?”

This is a common problem. My first suggestion would be to confirm that corn starch IS the problem, by following a diet that excludes it completely for three weeks, and see what effect this has on the migraines.

Sally – you can still eat a healthy and varied diet for such a short time, following a plan such as this No Starch Diet on an Internet forum. (Any-one who is in under medical care, pregnant or breast-feeding should consult their health-provider before changing their diet.)

Follow the above plan for three weeks and see what happens to the migraines. (Be aware that any intake of starch in the exclusion period will put you at risk of a migraine.)

If you decide that corn starch IS the culprit you can decide whether the corn based products are worth the migraines!

Another thing to try is re-introducing individual culprit foods one at a time, to see if it is one food in particular or just corn starch in general that triggers your migraine.  It may be that eating the same cereal based product every day is the problem, and rotating them with different cereal bases (say wheat, corn, rice, soya) over several days can remove the problem. If you eat these foods only occasionally, the problem may go.

Hope that helps, Sally.

One of the most common uses for reflexology is for stress relief.  In our fast paced society today, everyone is looking for a way to unload the stress of everyday life and for good reason.  Stress is a silent killer.  The effects of stress have been studied for quite some time and it is known that if you do not release stress from your body on a regular basis, it will eventually wreak havoc on your body in the form of one of many different sicknesses or diseases.  Furthermore, stress can definitely be a factor in migraine headache development.  Relieving stress is an important step in becoming well.

Although reflexologists cannot diagnose or claim to cure a sickness or disease, the results speak for themselves, making it one of the most sought after treatments today.  Many celebrities have regular reflexology sessions.  Not only is it beneficial as a tool for relaxation and stress management, but it is also an effective tool for improving circulation; relieving pain, and as an immune and nervous system stimulator.  Many people suffering from migraines have benefited from reflexology.

To learn more about reflexology, this website considers itself the “most popular reflexology site for foot and hand reflexology information on the Internet”. The site is impressive with some well known reflexologists presenting a good selection of reflexology charts, books, newsletters and research that is useful to therapists and patients alike.

If you plan to use a professional reflexologist, always check that they are fully registerd. Here is an information website provided by the Association of Reflexologists. It provides the latest information, useful links and contacts to the general public while a separate category has been made available especially for those that are trying to qualify as a therapist.

However, it seems not. Check out this excerpt from an article by Janis Graham:

Your Bedtime Routine
If you watch TV or read to “unwind” before bed, maybe you shouldn’t. Some 80 percent of women with chronic migraines end the day this way, research shows. These activities stimulate brain wave activity, making it harder to sleep, says Anne H. Calhoun, M.D., a clinical associate professor of neurology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You’re conditioning the brain to remain awake, she says, so you may be waking during the night without knowing it — and disrupted sleep is associated with headache frequency.

What to do

Skip (or TiVo) Letterman, turn in at the same time every night, and don’t eat for four hours before bed. Migraine sufferers who learned how to change their bedtime habits had a 40 percent overall improvement in headache frequency and intensity, a recent study found.

So there’s something counter-intuitive, and free, to try. For other helpful tips, you can read the rest of Janis Graham’s excellent article here.

Stop Your Migraines!

You’ll find more ways to minimise the risk of headache in my ebook.

Why not buy it now? When you have your next migraine you’ll wish you had bought it!

Is this a cause or an effect? After all, you hardly feel like exercise if all you want to do is lie in a darkened room with an ice-pack.

But a study in “Headache: the journal of head and face pain”  shows that aerobic exercise can reduce migraine pain.

It stands to reason really – and we’ve seen in another Natural Migraine Alternatives blog post than oxygen can help migraine.  So head on over to the article and read more.

In my own case, bizarrely, it seemed to be relief after getting through stress that would bring on a migraine. For example, if I were preparing  dinner for visitors, I would handle all the preparations perfectly adequately and even enjoy the evening, but then when it was all over, a migraine would develop.

This is largely history now, but I still get the occasional stress-triggered headache when I take on more than I should.

So it was with great interest that I found a free email course of tips on getting more done in your day.

The course promises that within minutes of registering, you will:

• See your day with instant clarity
• Focus instantly on what´s important
• Dump the rest (liberation is a click away)
• Clear your brain of clutter and distraction

And after receiving just a few days of their emails I’ve already had great results.

Register below, free, and within days you can boost your productivity and reduce your stress.

Their analysis of 7,601 men and women 20 years of age or older found that being overweight or obese increased the likelihood of headache by 1.2 to nearly 1.4 times.

You can read more details about the study here.

The team apparently adjusted for other factors potentially associated with increased headache risk such as gender, ethnicity, smoking, alcohol use, physical activity, diabetes and cholesterol levels. However, a sufferer with poor blood sugar control and a bad diet could be pre-diabetic, so not adjusted for,  and thus affect the findings.

The researchers look forward to further studies to investigate “whether obesity is causally related to the development of headaches”, but in the meantime, weight management might be a useful approach in headache management.

What is interesting, but less commonly reported, is that an increased prevalence of headache may be associated with being underweight as well, but there weren’t enough underweight study participants for sound analysis.

Analysis of a migraine sufferer’s diet is one the first areas a nutritionist will consider.

It isn’t the first time red wine has been mentioned on this blog and it probably won’t be the last. But, if red wine is one of your migraine triggers you’ll be well advised to avoid it over the holiday period.

Often a migraine is triggered by the cumulative effect of several triggers that on their own wouldn’t cause you a problem.

So poor diet, plus the stress of preparations and (dare I say it?) visitors – can all pile on the agony; and that glass of wine to relax could actually be the last straw that breaks the camel’s back and triggers a migraine!

Click to download some free tips on how to handle stress. They’ll stand you in good stead through the holidays, or in everyday life.

But I’ve also been looking for good news, and it arrived in the form of a website promoting the health benefits of red wine. You’ll find extensive information, and of course the obvious warning that moderation is key to all, together with some of the dangers of alcohol abuse.