After the 30 day RepairVite and 21 day ClearVite, all I wanted to do was dominate some spaghetti, pizza, pumpkin scones, and beer.  Everytime I went out to eat, I would mutter X-rated expletives at my husband and friends/family for eating their f’ing crusty bread with olive oil and parmesan cheese at Rosebud (clearly still not over it)

But the good news is after the diet comes re-introducing some goodies back into your life. Not all the goodies like the ones listed above, but specifically high-glucose fruits (bananas, mango, pineapple), nuts/seeds, legumes, regular potatoes, and gluten-free grains. It may not seem like much, but it was enough for a small tear of joy to trickle down my cheek (not exaggerating).

I felt like Helen Hunt at the end of Castaway – too shocked at first to try it, but then I had to dive right in

Ok ok you might think I’m being dramatic (and I haven’t actually watched the movie but heard they don’t end up together anyway), but we are talking to one of the biggest foodies of all time here! This isn’t like I just had to give up drinking caffeine for 30 days and then could start injecting Starbucks through an IV, this was a complete lifestyle change that involved eliminating some of my favorite activities (eating), and most of it is for LYFE, yo. 

It’s funny though, how going through such a restrictive diet as that one makes you appreciate a simple kidney bean or friggin tomato (oh, how I missed tomatoes).  The thing is, though – now that I know about what these inflammatory foods do to my insides, I’m still trying to limit consumption.  My diet prior to this journey consisted mostly of tomatoes and grains (spaghetti, pizza, spaghetti again, maybe a calzone), and that was the days of 2-3 headaches/migraines a week.

Not to mention, the whole weight loss thing – which again was an accidental and welcomed side effect. I was never huge or even big, but looking at the difference in pictures is crazy.

          MAY 2015                            SEPT 2015

So now what do I do? 

Well again, I can’t encourage you enough to go see a functional medicine practitioner, because everything I am doing is catered to my blood/spit/pee/poop results, but since I have a heavy intolerance to Gluten, Dairy, Quinoa, Rice, and Eggs, I will mostly be off of those forever (balls). BUT the good news is that I’ve gotten super creative with recipes using corn tortillas (which I can have), coconut flour (which is NOT the same to bake with as a warning) and beans. I’ll post a ton more, so make sure to check out the MIGRAINE FRIENDLY RECIPES section!

Have a question? Please post a comment below and we can start a discussion!

Ok, so how did I lose 17 pounds? Well it waddn’t fun, I’ll tell you that.

I’ve had to sit through many a wedding, barbeque, and pizza party salivating while I forced a bare chicken breast in my mouth.

Why do functional doctors put you on a diet? 

Well most of us were raised on the standard American diet. Aka crap food (gluten, dairy, etc). We were tricked into thinking that Nutrigrain bars are healthy and that oils like Coconut Oil are bad for us because they are high in fat.Therefore, myself – along with most American’s have what’s called a “leaky gut”. What is a leaky gut, you ask? Essentially what it means is that you’ve been feeding your body crap so much for so long that your cell membranes in your intestines break down and release food into the bloodstream, which is a no no and can result in other more scary and serious issues.When you have foreign invaders in your bloodstream, back to the sympathetic “flight or flight” response and migraine city. This is a great explanation for how the gut can be related to other underlying issues internally as well: 9 Signs You Have a Leaky Gut

So the program I did was a 30 day RepairVite powder and restrictive diet to repair the Leaky Gut, followed immediately by a 21 day liver detox with ClearVite. (51 days of dieting, now you see why I wanted to crawl in a hole and die?) However, what kept me going was that, after week one – I didn’t have another migraine. I barely even ever had a headache, maybe 3-4 total, and minimal pain at best.

Here’s the 30 day Repairvite plan.

Let’s just say it. It feels like you basically can’t eat anything 🙂 So you really have to plan, shop for, and focus on what you can eat in order to stay sane.  I should say at least 12 times, that this isn’t for everyone. This is for people who are suffering from chronic headaches and migraines, have tried various treatments like chiropractors and otherwise and still cannot find a solution. Because it’s tougher than tough, and it will test your determination.

What can you eat? Meat. Grass fed, and lots of it. I probably have eaten 5 cows, 10 turkeys, and 20 chickens in the last 2 months myself. Vegetables, bring em on. Load em in Coconut oil and saute in salt and pepper. And some fruits (low glycemic ones like cherries, apples,peaches and pears)

Keep in mind that you are doing these diets to repair your gut – eating low inflammatory foods to give your body a “reset” of sorts. So cheating even with one small bite of tomato throws your entire system off for weeks

Your gut lining is similar to a snake’s skin, in that it sheds a cell every day and produces a new one. It takes days for that new cell produced to get to the end of the thread and shed off, so cheating once can affect your body for a long long time. This funky picture below shows the bad cells in green and how even when they reach the end and shed off, they can re-enter through any other previous leaky gut cells (INSANE!)

After you’ve “reset” your body, you can start slowly introducing some foods back in the 21 day Clearvite diet (some high glycemic fruits, nuts and seeds, legumes/beans, and gluten-free grains) giving yourself 72 in between each introduction to note how your body is reacting. And if you go to a functional medicine practitioner they will test your body specifically against all common types of food insensitivities to see if there are others on there that you should always avoid, regardless of the diet.  Pretty much just know that Gluten and Dairy are most likely going to show up as an intolerance, because most of us cannot digest these structures the way we need to, thus causing our fat and/or perpetually ill American society.

All people in my doctor’s program go through this “reset” regardless of their food insensitivity results, because it’s important to fix that leaky gut before you are able to heal anything else. They way they worded it to me is you can get some temporary relief, but without fixing the core issue (gut) you will never get a lifetime of health back.

I’m not a scientist. Not even close. But I’m learning a little more and more each week about the actual long-term dangers of food and it has awakened me to what goes in my body. If you are sick of being in constant pain, look up the closest Functional Medicine doctor to you and ask for similar lab work done!

To be fair, it wasn’t me that decided to get rid of all pharmaceuticals. It was my hippy husband who was sick of watching me become more and more of a robot each day.

We would like to start a family sometime soon, so I decided to start caring about my body and ridding myself of all things pills. (even our friends Tylenol and Excedrin). At first it was NASTY. I missed a lot of work (thanks Doug for not firing me 🙂 ), and I was miserable. But then my body learned to cope with a higher pain tolerance.

A colleague of mine referred me to the Great Plains Institute. They are a lab that does extensive (and disgusting might I add) lab work to help identify possible causes for chronic illnesses. And that’s how I found Dr. Beyer.

Dr. Ed Beyer is a functional neurologist in Tinley Park, IL. You can watch his many chronic headache and migraine videos here. I will warn you, these videos are cheeeeee-zyyy. However, I’m 17 pounds thinner with no migraines in 50 days, so listen to him.

Functional Medicine is different from Traditional Medicine in that it’s designed to find the root cause of the problem, rather than treating symptoms.

Holy shit. You’re telling me that the doctors I’ve been going to for 30 years aren’t trying to fix the problem? No, why would they? Then you don’t come back.

If they treat enough of the symptoms that you are relatively happy but still miserable enough to come back, they profit.

Super sad, and super true.

I shouldn’t bash all doctors. I’m not saying all of them are doing this consciously, but many of them are so trained in higher level acute issues like Heart Attacks, Brain Tumors, etc that when a patient comes in with a lot of headaches – if the CT scan doesn’t show any lesions – they just prescribe a pill and get rid of the patient so they can focus on more pressing issues, as they should.

The cool thing that I love most about functional medicine is that treatment is 100% centered around you and your body. They do an insane (and I mean insane – like pooping into a cardboard box insane) amount of lab work before even coming up with treatment ideas to make you better, which I really like.

Then from the lab work, they decide where you are in relation to healthy people. With traditional medicine, if you had a blood test done at a lab at a doctor’s office, they compare your results with other people in that lab. But if you think about it, what’s the one thing everyone in that doctor’s office has in common? THEY’RE SICK! So why would you benchmark yourself against a sick person. Instead, functional medicine looks at the functional range before you are shit out of luck to see warning signs and red flags

Another thing they taught me, which I thought was interesting, is that almost all diseases begin in the gut. Ok, Hippocrates taught me that – but I forgot. And it makes sense to me – in college I gained the freshman 40 (yes 40) – but not from beer bongs and pokey sticks like I wished. I was in and out of hospitals trying to understand why my metabolism just stopped overnight and food hurt my stomach so bad. They never really figured out the cause, and when I removed high stress it went away, so I never thought anything of it again.  Turns out, years of inflammation have caused my body’s “fight or flight” hormones to supercharge like Keanu Reeves on speed in the movie Speed getting a speeding ticket.

The 3 main areas they are looking at for me is:

1. Food Insensitivity (Blood Panels) 
2. Hormonal Imbalances (28 Day and 1 Day Saliva Test)
3. Gut Flora Imbalance (The traumatizing poop test)
4. They also did some Urine work, but I’m not sure what that was for, so I’ll let you know when I learn

What I’m learning, which makes sense and is really cool, is that everything in your body relates to everything else.

Fixing or treating one problem or one area will never work long-term until you address the entire ecosystem.

It makes sense, right? Of course if I were to fix one area (say stop eating foods that I’m insensitive to) and my body doesn’t fix the hormonal issues I have, then my hormones are going to keep over-producing and triggering migraines to my brain. And visa versa, if I fix the hormone problem and eat Gluten (which I’m so saddened to know I’m insensitive to), my gut will flare up so much that it will trigger my midbrain to freak the f out, and we are on the first train to migraine city.

More to come on specifics / what I’m learning, but basic Functional Medicine knowledge is important to know the WHY behind they do what they do (because 90% of the time they sound like looneys).

Hi, my name’s Amanda. I’m a chronic migrainer. (or should I say WAS). From the age of 16, I started getting very bad headaches, which turned into migraines in my college and adult years. Over the course of the past 6-7 years, I’ve had a 5-6 at least every other day, and a 10 probably once or twice a month.

I’ve been to just about every type of specialist in the world for my headaches. From Neurologists, to “world-renowned” headache clinics (hint: the Diamond Headache Clinic blows – don’t waste your time), to ENTs, to even Gastroenterologists.  What do they do for you? Prescribe, Prescribe, Prescribe.  Why? Because traditional medicine is pharmaceutically driven.

Wait…Doctors are incentivized and PAID more money when they prescribe us pills? WTF

I know, right? It’s beyond stupid. But knowing this makes you question – are they in it to fix you or keep you coming back for more?

I’ve been on Beta Blockers, Anti-Depressents, Anti-Convulsants, and even suggested intense Opiates for my pain. And yet, somehow – miraculously – my headaches seemed to be getting worse. Why? Because I was training my body to become immune to these drugs, and poisoning myself with their ridiculous side effects. Think I’m kidding, check out these side effects for Divalproex, an anti-convulsant drug I was on for 2 years! (Yes, they prescribed me an epilepsy pill for headaches – hmm red flag #12)

But don’t worry, that’s not the complete list. Contact your doctor or pharmacist for the 200 other things it could possibly do other than LITERALLY KILLING YOU! It literally says on side effects that you could die, and I took this drug. That’s how desperate I was to get rid of these.

Were my headaches less frequent and less severe? Yes. But I wasn’t myself and I knew it – and my poor, poor husband did too.  Oh, and when I decided I had it with pharmaceuticals and quit taking it (without weaning off) I was almost hospitalized for the most ridiculous vertigo and dizziness I’ve ever experienced in my life.

It was like tripping on acid while riding a unicycle upside down (or so I’m guessing).

Ok, so that’s my fault for being an idiot – but my point is, why should we educated people keep mindfully and willingly putting drugs in our body that are so incredibly horrible for us that they give us dangerous withdrawals?

I think my favorite hot mess that I tried was an anti-depressant. Something in the way it enters the brain has shown a positive response in migrainers, so I thought – what the heck – if my Neurologist is prescribing it I’ll try.

I’m pretty sure that if you take a Bi-polar drug when you aren’t Bi-polar, it turns you Bi-polar.

May the Lord have mercy on anyone’s soul I encountered during my brief stint with those drugs. Holy Canoli I was a raging lunatic. And I’m an actor, so public speaking is usually my forte. I had a presentation at work one day that I prepped weeks for. Got up to speak in front of 3 of our VPs and couldn’t even form a sentence. I ran out of the room crying (another thing I would NEVER do in an office setting) and instantly cut myself off the pills.

So why am I telling you all this? Because pharmaceuticals are the easy way out. They require essentially no work on your end other than raising your hand to your mouth and swallowing it down, they are usually super cheap with insurance coverage, and they treat enough of the symptoms that you can live with the rest of the pain you are in. But I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to live with a headache every day. I had just given in to the fact that for the rest of my life I would be in pain, but that’s not the case anymore.

Check out my next blog post on Functional Medicine, and I’ll introduce what I’m working on! Today is day 49 migraine free, and I’ve lost 17 pounds since June 30 (and I wasn’t a person who considered myself in need of losing weight, that was just a lovely side effect 🙂 ) It’s not easy, but damn it’s effective.

Hey everyone! I felt compelled to create this blog because, as I’ve been sharing my migraine stories with others I meet, I’m finding that this chronic disease is so incredibly common that I have to share my story with more people.

Anyone who suffers from chronic headaches and/or migraines is used to talking about their daily pain on a scale of 1-10. And your boss looks at you like you are crazy when you say, “I’m sorry, I have a 13 today. I have to leave early”

It’s gotten to the point where when I find other “migrainers” as I refer to them, it seems like we are in some freakish cult where all we can talk about is what new treatments we are trying, how our prescriptions wear off after a while, and how frozen peas work much better than strawberries.

The good news?! After 15 years of debilitating headaches, I’m finally fixing my f’d up self and going to a new doc, one who doesn’t believe in the power of terrifying pharmaceuticals. Today is day 45 of being Migraine-free and, while it’s still work every day, I’m 100% better than where I started. Oh, and I just happened to lose 17 pounds in the process. #NBD

I’ll be sharing what I’m learning through this process, fun recipes that make your head not hurt, and my thoughts on some other treatments out there!  Enjoy!