Migraine

I get a really bad head with either really high or really low bg... and typically they only go away after a sleep.. ibuprofen sometimes works for me.. have tried codine when quite bad which helps but care needed as it's an opioid

Try drinking a lot of water and increasing your salt intake.
The frequency of my migraines has reduced since I got sugars under control but I still get the odd one and a pinch of salt and an extra glass of water (and a sleep) often works
I'm tagging @Goonergal who has links and info

Thanks @MrsA2 for the tag. @lotuslight I’ll be back (much) later today with a proper reply - need to dig out all the links and I’m heading off to work shortly.

Good hydration, ensuring you keep your electrolytes up are two good starting points.

Hi again @lotuslight

Sorry I didn’t get back to this yesterday, was a very long day! I suffered with chronic migraines for most of my adult life but have not had one since July 2017, since adopting the ketogenic diet.

For me it makes a lot of sense - many of the prophylactic drugs used for migraine (I ran through just about all of them in my time) have a primary purpose of treating epilepsy. A ketogenic diet is often used to treat epilepsy in children……

At diagnosis with type 2, I was treating 6-8 a month (and that was an improvement over matters for the previous few years). I never had aura, ‘just’ the headache and vomiting. They did initially get worse when I first started keto, perhaps because of a combination of carb withdrawal, lack of salt and electrolyte depletion so the advice you’ve been given about that above is great.

I have never been able to find a food trigger for migraines. The only sure things I identified prior to them deciding to leave me were lack of sleep and missing a meal. Now neither of these causes them either. In my case it’s clear to me that they were very clearly related to fluctuating blood sugar levels.

There is a lot of interesting information in this thread: https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/for-migraine-sufferers.155890/ and if you run a search on ‘migraine’ you’ll find it crops up fairly often on the forum.

I’d also recommend looking up the work of Dr Angela Stanton who has developed a protocol for treating migraine - she was a sufferer herself. She has a book and also a Facebook group, which is very active and where she takes the time to provide help and support. You can find that here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/MigraineSufferers/?ref=share

I really hope you find a solution, they really are disabling and pernicious things. Getting rid of them has been by far the biggest impact of this way of eating on my quality of life.

lotuslight said:

Hi just to add doctor didn’t think related to my diabetes and I have got migraine meds - thank you

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Was busy composing my reply above so hadn’t seen this. Over the years I’ve run through just about every prophylactic for migraine and finally had a break through in around 2014 and was able to gradually decrease and then stop that form of medication completely (involved a spell in hospital and a lot of perseverance). That still left me treating between 6 and 8 migraines a month with frovatriptan.

It’s really hard to break the cycle!

I suffer from cluster headaches and these can be bright in when I have a hypo

I have both migraine and cluster headaches, predating my T2 by decades.

The worst thing in terms of BS is I get nausea before the headaches and find I only want to eat white carb high foods. However, I drink sugar-free ginger ale when it's at its worst, which doesn't affect my BS.
Sleeping off a migraine if you can is helpful.