In a break between activities, you notice it. This morning, your head was heavy with thoughts and plans, but you now find yourself unable to string together sentences. Your eyes are unable to focus — you keep seeing lines and waves that aren’t really there — and it feels like your brain has been replaced with soft, weightless cotton. Part of you knows what’s happening; you remember how it’s felt the past 100 times you’ve experienced this, and what’s to come, but you always hold out. Maybe it will pass — at least, you hope it will pass. You chug water, eat a healthy snack and slip on your shades, but to no avail. Later in the afternoon, the pain hits you. Hard. All the plans and thoughts dissipate as the waves of pain become a constant hum felt deep in your body.
Because Chronic Migraine is considered a “primary headache disorder,” many people falsely believe that a migraine is just a really bad headache. I don’t blame them for misunderstanding; it’s hard to imagine the pain of others without relating it to something one has experienced. However, for me at least, a headache is only part of the experience. Migraines can be full body pain, from head to toe, a constant ache, sometimes like a train spike lodged in your skull. They can be brain fog that lasts for hours, even if you don’t experience pain, causing you to stumble, stutter, and possibly collapse. They can make your body swell and your sinuses drain as if you’re fighting off an infection. Out of all the pain and discomfort I’ve experienced, I would rank migraines as the most uncomfortable and debilitating.
Worse still, the cause of migraine is largely unknown, although there are speculations by both migraineurs and scientists that are being explored. Many migraineurs document their days in a migraine diary in order to identify specific triggers, but the connection between triggers and migraines is tenuous. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe you’re dehydrated or maybe your clothes fit a bit too tightly. Despite the lack of evidence, many migraineurs report dietary triggers, such as MSG, nitrates, sulfates or gluten, as being the primary cause of their headaches.
One possible trigger that scientists have been keen to explore is obesity. Multiple studies have attempted to link body weight and migraines; a recent study conducted by researchers at John’s Hopkins University found that being either underweight or overweight may make migraines worse, although it is still unclear if weight gain or weight loss can lower migraine risk. Don’t count your calories before they hatch, though; it is known that fasting, skipping meals, or dieting rigorously can cause migraines, as well as make them more painful. Migraineurs may still be advised to start dieting and lose weight by their doctors, which is unsurprising considering the prevalence of anti-fat bias in the medical field.
When I was about 8, my sister took me to visit the town nurse because she suspected I had a urinary tract infection. After the urine test, the nurse practitioner scolded me because I was “obese;” she instructed me to start dieting and stop eating after 6:00pm, but because I was 8 years old and had no control over when I had my meals and what they contained, I couldn’t act on her advice. For the first time, I felt real shame about the shape and size of my body that I have been unable to shake. For years, I hid my arms and legs behind long sleeved tops and jeans, hoping to avoid critical eyes. I avoided exercise because of the way my body jiggled and the way people’s eyes followed me. I rarely talked to my friends or family about my love for cooking and eating food; they were already quick to comment on my size without prompt. I wanted to make myself smaller and smaller until no one would notice me.
Last year, while defending a fat Twitter mutual against fatmisic harassment, I was harassed and interrogated again about my diet. I rebutted with the fact that I ate a plant-based diet, walked everywhere and didn’t eat junk food or drink sodas, but the harassers continued to chant about how I should still be counting calories, because obviously I was f*cking up somewhere to be as fat as I am. Part of me knew that they were only trying to cause me pain, but another part of me stored the information deep in my brain, reminding me that every time I felt inadequate that I should just start counting calories, and that I had no right to feel bad about myself if I wasn’t really trying to be healthy (read: thin).
In the winter of 2018, my migraines began to increase in frequency and intensity. I was living in Boston for a semester away program, participating in a 30 hour-a-week internship while taking classes, and the stress was piling up. After speaking to my mentor about what I was experiencing, she recommended that I start a migraine diary. I am terrible at journaling, and the amount of information most migraine diaries require the user to enter can be overwhelming during a migraine, so I decided to start small and simple by tracking my meals. Rather than write all my meals down by hand, I started using the food tracking mobile app LifeSum (what a name!) to enter my meals via barcodes and pre-listed, common serving sizes of staples such as milk or eggs.
LifeSum’s true purpose is to allow people to track their calories, water intake and exercise time. By default, LifeSum prompts the user to input meal information 4 times a day for breakfast, lunch, a snack and dinner. Once a user enters in their meal information, the data is used to rate whether or not the meal was “healthy;” more details are available if you pay a monthly fee, but LifeSum will stick smiley and frowny faces next to your meals for free to, er, encourage you to eat healthier. Even though I started using LifeSum for an entirely different purpose, I soon gave in to the little voice in the back of my head telling me that I needed to change something about how I ate or I would never be healthy (again, read: thin).
In the beginning, all was well; I did not have to alter my eating habits in order to earn my smiley faces and feel good about myself and my health. However, my busy schedule and my migraines made it harder for me to maintain what the app considered healthy eating habits; some days I ate too few calories, some days I overate and some days I couldn’t reach the perfect ratio of proteins, carbs and fat. The comforting, convenient foods I ate while I was experiencing a migraine, such as a donut from down the street or a quick meal of buttery noodles with soy sauce and Kalles, were not exactly the most nutritious foods, and I frequently earned frowny faces for my meals. Before long, I forgot my original intentions and began to feel the same shame about my body and my eating habits on top of the migraine discomfort.
Recently, I stopped using LifeSum to track my meals. For a few weeks, my migraines were so frequent and severe that I spent most of my free time laying in bed, waiting for the pain to pass. The anxiety I felt about keeping track of my meals and not eating “healthily” all the time was only adding to the extreme discomfort. The few things that comforted me during my migraines like a soda, some mozzarella sticks, a bit of chocolate or any other comfort food were things that I no longer wanted to withhold from myself. So I stopped.
Navigating life as a migraineur tends to mean navigating a stressful relationship between the body and discomfort. With all the discomfort and pain that migraineurs experience because of our illness, it seems unnecessary to add any further discomfort without a good reason. Diet culture only leads people to feel insecure about themselves and their eating habits, adding layers of physical, emotional and social discomfort to the migraineur’s life for little to no benefit. Not only is this true for migraineurs, but for any person pursuing weight loss diets in the hopes of improving their health; most people who lose 10% of their weight will only gain that weight back, possibly gaining more weight than they had before, and the stress of fluctuating weight on their bodies only makes them feel less healthy than they did before losing the weight.
For now, I’ve decided to listen to my body more than outside influences when it comes to my health. Eat when you’re hungry, drink when you’re thirsty, get enough sleep and take your meds! This is the routine that has done the most for reducing the frequency and the pain of my migraines. Other migraineurs have found their own solution in diets, vitamins, herbal creams and even cannabis, and that’s fine too. We’re all doing the best to feel as comfortable and pain-free as possible in a world where there is little research on and understanding of our illness. Hopefully, as researchers understand more about migraines, there will be fewer failing “miracle cures” and more effective, wellness focused, non-fatmisic approaches to reducing pain and discomfort.
