1. Get of all medications that you possibly can be off, especially medications which are “rescue” drugs and not taken on a regular schedule.
2. The diet, which is the bit everybody talks about.
3. Preventative medications. if the diet doesn’t help you enough (and only then) find a preventative med which works for you and use that too. He mentions a lot of different preventative medication options, and advocates experimenting until you find a med or combination that works for you.

Personally I think the 1-2-3 are out of order and incomplete for those with frequent migraine or chronic daily headache type pain. It’s virtually impossible for chronic severe pain sufferers to wean off all pain medications until the pain itself is less severe and/or frequent. Or, if we can manage it, the pain is so incapacitating that we can’t function at all and most people can’t afford to take several weeks out of their life to be incapacitated.

What I did, and would recommend to anybody else if they can cope with the more complicated method, is this order of things:

1. Read ALL of the book, every single word. You don’t have to agree with it all, but you do need to understand where he’s coming from. If it takes a few weeks, that’s OK. While you’re reading, slowly wean yourself off anything containing caffeine (tea, coffee, cola, etc.) – this might take a while as they’re likely to cause rebound headaches if you lower your intake quickly.
2. Start the diet, but remember that you don’t need to start all at once. Start with “low hanging fruit” items which are easy to switch out and get more strict as you go along and get used to it. Definitely stop all caffeine at this point. You can start planning for how you’ll deal with the full diet, too.
3. Start weaning off medications – take smaller doses when you take them, try to put off taking rescue drugs if you can, etc. Wean off anything that might cause rebound headaches especially – see list in book. Steady-state meds which you take on a regular basis regardless of pain levels are least important at this point I think.
4. Start journaling as much about migraine triggers and pain symptoms (all pain symptoms – not just ones you call migraines) as you can. Record everything that might be a trigger or a symptom, and all meds/ supplements taken. Keep journaling every day as you go along the next steps.
5. Work up to full strict diet as prescribed in the book, being utterly careful that everything is as strict as possible. Watch for additives in ANYTHING that comes with a packet and keep checking them – companies change ingredients without notice quite often.
6. If you know of any non-food triggers which are controllable, do your best to control your exposure to these.
7. Wean off all rescue drugs, and as much of the steady-dose preventatives as you can manage. Your pain/headaches should be significantly less at this point.
8. Stay at this state, being super strict about the diet and journaling everything you can.
9. When you do have pain/migraine, can you pinpoint what’s caused it? At this point, I got migraines when there was storm front hit (abrupt barometric pressure change), when I was exposed to certain aerosols, and when there was acute emotional or physical stress, but could almost always pinpoint the stressor or weather event that caused it. The feeling of control just from knowing what caused the pain was amazing! If you discover more non-food triggers then work on controlling your exposure to those rigorously too.
10. Stay at this point, ideally, for several months to give your body a rest from migrainous pain and a chance to get less “trigger happy”. I found things continued to improve for several months even though I wasn’t doing anything differently. I think the nervous system needs time to settle and heal.
11. If you are still getting pain you can’t deal with, work with increasing preventative/steady-state meds until things are at a level where you can function. (His step 3). If you needed to do this, go back to step 9 and do it again – your body NEEDS the break.
12. Start to make diet less strict, journaling any food change to assist you. Any food will stay in your system for about 4 days so don’t do trials closer together than 4 days apart. Remember the “bucket of triggers” idea from the book and if you react to a food but it’s one you really like, see if you can tolerate a smaller amount.
13. Find a state where your diet, your preventative and rescue medications, and your pain levels are all something you can cope with. The pain won’t be zero and you’ll still have a lot of food limitations, but there will be a level of compromise that you find acceptable. Personally, I found that I would have been happy to stay on the über strict version of the diet forever, it reduced my migrainous pain levels about 95% – if the price for that was the strict diet, it was totally worth it!

I must admit, “Heal Your Headache: The 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13 Program” just doesn’t have the same ring about it. Perhaps Bucholtz was onto something after all?

- Ricky

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Instead of pain which is nearly constant and frequently severe, my headache pain now only occurs perhaps a few hours a week and at a mild to moderate level. I can also almost always identify the trigger of any particular “bout” of headache pain, which helps me cope with it and plan to avoid it next time.

When I started the program there was nearly zero information available on the internet about people’s personal experiences, so I started posting relevant articles to my personal blog. Some of these posts have now been moved here to create a better resource for people.

• You can read all my migraine-related blog entries if you’d like my personal story. They’ll pop up in reverse order – most recent first
• The 1-2-3 Program In 13 Steps describes how I implemented the information in the book myself.
• Coping With Medical Diets is about diets in general, how to cope and plan and organise yourself to give yourself the best chance of sticking to the diet.
• Searching For Migraine-Friendly Recipes explains how to use the Meals For You website’s advanced search engine to search for recipes likely to be migraine-friendly, or easily adaptable.
• The Example Meal List contains a huge long list of all the migraine friendly meals I cook here at home. There really are a lot of things when you think about it!

Recipes

These are recipes which I use and have adapted to be migraine-friendly. Usually I cook from scratch rather than using packets which makes things much easier – hidden ingredients such as MSG, onion powder, and preservatives which are triggers generally only occur in packet foods. Starting with whole foods makes it easy to be sure you’re making the right choices.

I plan to post more of these as I get around to it. If there are any you particularly like from the list above just let me know and I’ll add them.

• Sweet Potato Bake

Other Resources

Other great websites I’ve found with resources related to “Heal Your Headache” include:

• Migraine-Free Cooking and the Migraine-Free Cooking Blog by Heidi Gunderson.
• The Headache Trigger Diet Ning, a support and social group on the web started by Diane Goodman.
• Green Alert: Heal Your Magraines is another migraine-friendly recipe blog, although it doesn’t focus specifically on the Bucholtz program.

Know of more resources online? Leave a comment and I’ll add them!

- Ricky

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For the Aussie-language-impaired, “Kraft cheese” is what the David Buchholz book and Wikipedia call “American cheese”. Basically it’s that processed plastic-ey crap which I assume is excluded from the “do not eat cheese” category because it contains no actual cheese whatsoever. I think all the other words translate OK – ask if something doesn’t make sense.

• Risotto (with homemade or MSG-free stock)
• Fish & Chips (no lemon!)
• Kebabs with salad
• Stir Fry (no soy sauce)
• Oven baked fish, baked potato, steamed veg
• Oven baked fish & baked veg
• Roast meat & gravy & baked veg
• Porridge with golden syrup and fruit
• Muesli (put together specially – no nuts and only OK dried fruit)
• Tabouleh
• Glazed Meatballs
• Hamburgers
• Rissoles with side dish
• Pasties
• Roast veg with grilled/roast meat
• Sausage rolls (Anne’s recipe)
• Stir fry
• Pies made with puff pastry in sandwich maker
• Toasted sandwiches (Kraft cheese)
• Grilled Kraft cheese and stuff on toast
• Mac & cheese (Kraft cheese) and tuna/salmon/veg added
• Open sandwiches
• Regular sandwiches
• Fried rice made with permitted ingredients
• Vegetarian kebabs with permitted sauce
• Feta cheese rissoles
• Baked meatballs
• Corned silverside boiled with vegetables (this has nitrites which the diet excludes)
• Potato bread
• Mushroom loaf
• Savoury macaroni
• Hummous (vinegar instead of lemon juice)
• Zingy bean paté (with permitted beans)
• Brisket with mushrooms
• Paprika-roasted potatoes & pumpkin & sweet potato
• Mock whitebait
• Pasties
• Meatloaf
• Chicken & Baked potato with pesto dressing
• Asparagus with toasted pine nuts and Vinai (use vinegar instead of lemon)
• Asparagus, mushrooms, and peas
• Sweet butternut casserole
• Stirfry with permitted sauce (of what I usually buy, fish sauce is the only which is OK)
• Beetroot potato bake
• Sweet potato Latkes
• Baked potato soup (homemade stock)
• Vinter vegetable hot-pot
• Chicken noodle lettuce cups
• Breadcrumbed baked fish with wilted spinach
• Salmon and green bean salad
• Ricky’s weird potato salad
• Home-made hamburgers
• Chargrilled lamb with vegetable couscous
• Beef & mushroom burgers
• Spicy meat rolls
• Lamb salad
• Sliced chicken with chunky mushroom gravy
• Mushroom salad with pine nuts and watercress
• Broccoli salad with olives
• Sweet potato and quinoa stew
• Roast potato, green bean and olive salad

I actually do have the recipes for all of these – although some are more ideas than recipes. If you would like a specific recipe just ask and I’ll post happily it for you.

- Ricky

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1. Open up the Meals for You advanced search page.

2. On the web page’s section “1″, type or copy-and-paste this into the box marked “exclude”:

onion parmesan cheddar avocado bacon wine beer banana raisins raspberries

3. Under the “Special dietary needs”, tick the boxes to exclude these:

• peanut products
• tree nuts
• citrus
• caffeine
• chocolate

Also tick any other boxes which apply to you – I’ve ticked these things which don’t agree with me:

• soy products
• tomato
• eggs

4. Add any other one-word foods you can think of to the “Exclude” box you filled in step 2. Note that two word foods such as “tasty cheese” won’t work – it will exclude anything with the word “tasty” AND anything with the word “cheese” – probably not what you want.

I haven’t found any way to deal with foods with more than one word, unless one of those words only happens with that specific food – such as using “parmesan” to exclude “parmesan cheese”.

5. In the next step, choose any desired nutrition levels. You may like to tick the “low” button for sugar or salt, for example, or the “high” button for fibre.

6. Choose any preparation time limits you want.

7. Click on the “Search” button near the bottom of the page but beware – you’re not finished yet!

8. When the results page has loaded, it will have used your “exclude” words from step 2 to only exclude those words in the titles of recipes. We need to exclude them in the ingredients – click on the “search ingredients” button to do the search you really want.

It happily surprised me that even with all the exclusions I’d put in, the site still had 302 recipes for me. I was thinking there wouldn’t be many left after I took out all those ingredients!

9. If you want to now narrow your search further, put words you want to search for in the “Include” box or extra things to exclude in the “Exclude box” and press “Search ingredients” again. The search will remember your other preferences as long as you use the same search page.

Caveat: Be careful with the results – they are not guaranteed to be migraine friendly recipes.

Some of the things that the migraine exclusion diet excludes are hard to put in a list like this – “MSG” for example is never on a recipe ingredients list but may or may not be included in the chicken stock you purchased to use the recipe with. Use your common sense and check each recipe and any purchased ingredients as you would any other time.

So why bother using a search like this? It gives you recipes which are more likely to be migraine-friendly, or easy to adapt to make them migraine-friendly. It also may give you ideas for new ingredients, or new ways to use old ingredients – I’ve never cooked artichokes before, but one of the recipes uses artichokes. Perhaps I’ll like them!

- Ricky

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Ingredients

• 3 Sweet Potatoes, peeled and quartered
• 2 large cooking apples, peeled, cored and chopped.
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup melted butter
• 1/4 cup pine nuts
• 1/8 cup whole wheat or plain flour
• 2 tablespoons melted butter
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Preparation

1. Place sweet potatoes into a large saucepan and enough water to cover. Bring to a boil and cook for 25 minutes, or until tender yet firm. Drain, cool and cut into 1 centimetre slices.
2. Preheat oven to 175 degrees C. Lightly spray oil into a 28 x 18 x 4 cm baking tin.
3. In a small bowl, mix the 2 tablespoons brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg.
4. Layer sweet potatoes, 2 tablespoons of melted butter, brown sugar mixture and apples in the prepared baking tin.
5. In a medium bowl, mix flour, remaining brown sugar, butter and pecans. Spread over top of the apples.
6. Bake in the preheated oven for 30 minutes or until lightly brown.

Serve and enjoy!

- Ricky

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