Headaches anyone?

[muzikgal]

Hey all,

I've been LCing since April 21st working my way towards induction... I like to ease into things ;) ... and started induction on May 1st. This morning I woke up with the most horrendous headache, which is highly uncommon for me. I'm wondering if anyone else has experience this during induction... is there something I need to change?

To give a bit of background, I have been eating about 15-18g of carbs a day and have averaged 1250 calories a day (fitday rocks!). For the past 2 days I have not been as hungry so my calorie dropped to about 900 or so calories. I have not skipped any meals, just eating less I guess. Other than the headache, I have been feeling great, loosing lbs and inches and staying in ketosis.

Coming back to today's headache, I'm not one to take asprin or any other pain killers, so I decided to try a cup of coffee with a 1/4 tsb of white sugar in it. The headache went away within minutes. So here's the question(s)... could this have been caffeine withdraw? Or maybe a signal that my brain needed more fuel?

Thanks for any input!

[cartmanis]

Headaches are very common right at the first of induction. I'm not sure if it is your body switching and detoxing from carbs, or for a lot of people giving up caffiene. Personally I took a couple of exedrin to get through it and have been fine since. Your calories are rather low though, which may have an effect as well. There are some threads around on the 10-12x your weight for how many calories you should be shooting for (if you want to get into counting things), and if you are full, the easiest way to add calories is to add fats/oils to your foods, so add that extra butter, olive oil, fatty dressings to keep those numbers up. Otherwise, a lot of people find they stall since the body slows downs its metabolism to match the lower calories it is getting.

Good luck, hope this helps some.

[justcindy]

I had headaches the first week too they are gone now so hang in there! :)

[hatetocook]

I've found that I get headaches after eating something with aspartame in it and other people here have had similar reactions to it. IMO, I don't think caffeine withdrawal is the culprit or else your headaches wouldn't have waited 3 weeks to start.

[wbahn]

Most people that suffer headaches during Induction seem to do so in the Day 2 to Day 5 vicinity - but you said that you were easing into things so that might be the cause for the delay. Both caffeine and carb withdrawal seem to be able to give pounding headaches so it is really hard to tell - and it might have been completely coincidental.

Hope it doesn't return.

[YukonSun]

You need to be eating 20g of carbs a day, from vegetables.
And for calories, about 10 X your body weight in calories. Both yours seem low.
If you aren't getting enough fuel, headaches will result.
Tammy