I did it properly — nothing on the list for twelve weeks, logged everything, and my attack count went from about six a month to about six a month. I feel slightly cheated, because the food trigger list is the first thing everyone hands you. Did anyone find a food trigger that survived actually testing it, and if the classic list is wrong, why is it everywhere?
One survived for me, and testing it was miserable but conclusive: aged parmesan, reliably, within about six hours, roughly four times out of five.
What made me believe it rather than assume it was doing the reintroduction one item at a time, two weeks apart, on days when nothing else was unusual — no bad sleep, not premenstrual, no weather front. Everything else on the eliminated list came back with no effect at all, including chocolate, which I'd blamed for a decade.
So they exist. They're individual, they're rarer than the lists suggest, and you can only find yours by adding things back deliberately rather than removing a whole category.
Two weeks apart and only on unremarkable days is far more disciplined than what I did — I removed everything at once and reintroduced the whole list in a fortnight because I was sick of it.
That's what I did too, and it's why neither of us learned anything. The removal is the easy half; the careful reintroduction is where the information is.
Disagreeing with the whole trigger-hunting frame rather than the food part.
Single triggers mostly don't work like a switch, they stack. My attacks come when three or four things line up: short sleep, a skipped lunch, a long drive, and the day before my period. Any one of those alone does nothing. All four and it's near certain.
Which means an elimination diet that removes one variable from a threshold system will show you nothing, exactly as yours did. What changed my count was fixing the boring ones — regular meals, consistent sleep and wake times including weekends, drinking properly. Nothing sellable, no list, about a 40% reduction over a year.
It's the most common thing in every diary I've ever compared with someone. Skipped meals and short sleep beat every exotic trigger people chase.
The meals point stings a bit, because I skip lunch most days and had entirely discounted it as too obvious to matter.
Test one thing at a time, reintroduce rather than eliminate, and log sleep and meals alongside food or the diary can't tell you anything. Most people's real triggers are dull.
I spent six months on an elimination protocol I found online — no aged anything, no citrus, no nuts, no cured meat, nothing fermented. Ate joylessly, lost weight I didn't want to lose, and got the same number of attacks.
What I'd tell my past self is that if a food genuinely triggers you, three or four weeks of removing it will show it. Six months of removing eighteen things shows you nothing except that you're tired and sad, and it makes eating with other people a project.
Weather is the one I'd add to the boring list. Pressure drops before a front do it for me reliably enough that I now check the forecast the way other people check a diary — no diet has ever done anything comparable.
@aura_annie · 2mo ago
The explanation my headache clinic gave me reordered this completely: for a lot of people, the chocolate craving is already part of the attack.
The hours before the pain — the prodrome — can come with food cravings, yawning, mood changes, neck stiffness. So you crave something sweet, you eat it, and hours later the pain arrives, and you have a beautifully convincing story about chocolate that's actually the attack causing the eating rather than the other way round.
That's why the classic list is everywhere and why it survives testing so badly. It's built from exactly the kind of story that feels like evidence.
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