Solutions to drugs that keep you fat 8—Migraine drugs….

Today's Post:  Friday, 5-11-2012

Friday, 3-9-2012, our post “Some drugs can keep you fat” listed several kinds of general strategies to drugs that tend to fatten you or keep you fat.  For most of them, there is a better drug or a way to improve your condition that avoids using that drug.

Friday, 3-16, we covered anti-depressants since some of those can keep you fat.  Some don’t including Zyban aka Wellbutrin that helps some people quit smoking.

Friday, 3-23, we covered blood pressure lowering drugs.

Friday, 3-30, we covered drugs for type 2 diabetes.

Friday, 4-6, we covered statin drugs.  (There are far better ways to protect your heart.  And statins cause the exercise that is essential for beneficial and permanent fat loss harm you instead.!)

Friday, 4-13, we covered Corticosteroids.  (Some problems those help are hard to treat without them but your doctor may be able to help you use them in a way that minimizes the fat gain.  The better news is that for asthma, using corticosteroids can almost always be temporary.)

Friday, 4-20, we covered Birth Control pills. 

Today we cover migraine drugs.

Some of them will fatten you a lot.  There’s three kinds of good news  though.

1.  Some migraine drugs don’t fatten you. One or more of those might work for you and solve the problem caused by the kinds that do.

2.  The exercise and physical activity that help cause fat loss and helps you be healthy and keep off the fat turn off or turn down migraines for many people!

3.  There are also many other nondrug ways to turn off migraines that work for some people.

Combining these strategies has a good shot at helping you with both fat loss and being migraine free or far less often and severely bothered by migraines.

Best of all, treating migraines with the combination largely turns off the extra heart risk that people who have migraines often have.

1.  Take less fattening migraine drugs. 

A Newsmax article on fattening drugs noted that Depakote and Depakene, antiseizure drugs, are sometimes used to treat migraines but have very strong appetite boosting effects in many people.  They quote Louis Aronne, M.D., medical director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Program in New York as noting that Imitrex or Topamax are less likely to cause you to gain weight or fat. 

Switching migraine drugs can really help. Dr. Aronne noted one of his patients lost 50 pounds by switching to less fattening migraine drugs.

2.  The exercise and physical activity that help cause fat loss and help you be healthy and keep off the fat turn off or turn down migraines for many people!

I’ve read that the majority of people who have migraines who begin to exercise have fewer migraines while some have none and others who still have them have milder ones.  That means you can take the drugs less often, not at all, or in smaller doses.

Doing vigorous exercise every week tends to strongly improve your circulation.  In fact, every year you do it, the better it works!  Interval cardio and strength training really help.

Your blood vessels become more responsive and flexible and have less plaque clogging them up. 

Such exercise tends to prevent or turn down insulin resistance and high blood sugar levels which helps prevents damage to the inside of your blood vessels.

And at any given weight, you will be less fat and have more lean weight and muscle mass.

Even better, when you stop eating and drinking the most fattening stuff almost all the time and eat more health supporting foods, that also helps improve your circulation and blood vessel health. Eating right tends to prevent or turn down insulin resistance and high blood sugar levels which helps prevents damage to the inside of your blood vessels as just one example.

And, there’s a reason this helps turn down or turn off migraines and the extra heart risk people who get migraines have.

Migraines in part are a malfunction of your blood vessels which dilate or not in ways that produce migraines but are not entirely normal.  Making your blood vessels healthier and function better with exercise and eating right begins to normalize them and often does so enough to turn off migraines.

That means that the work you do to cause fat loss and to keep it off is also a migraine preventive and treatment to some degree.

So having migraines is an extra incentive to do the things that will make and keep you less fat.

3.  There are other things besides drugs that eliminate or turn down migraines.  Try them because they have solved the problem for other people!

Some supplements work.

Magnesium is often deficient in people who get migraines and it is critical to having your blood vessels be normal and flexible.  Today most people tend not to get enough in food too.  (Eating nuts if you aren’t allergic and eating greens and some other nonstarchy vegetables tends to work well for people losing fat and keeping it off.  And these foods are high in magnesium.)

a) Taking 200 to 600 mg a day of magnesium works well for many people.  A double-blind study of  people who often got migraines and who took 600mg magnesium a day experienced a 41.6% fewer migraines!  Taking that much magnesium also helps lower blood pressure a bit in people for whom it’s high and has many other health benefits.

(Important note:  Don’t take lots of Milk of Magnesia AND take that much magnesium too.  The overdose of magnesium that huge an intake causes can be harmful.)

b) B complex vitamins help.  In addition to eating foods high in them such as egg yolks, take a good multi vitamin and a good B complex supplement.  (I think Solgar’s B Complex plus C, stress formula is the best and take that myself.)  In fact one source said doing so and including some extra folic acid with the other B vitamins tended to reduce the frequency and severity of migraines. (Extra folic acid is taking 400 to 800 mcg a day in addition to the 400 mcg in most multi vitamins.)

In addition, taking much larger amounts of vitamin B2, riboflavin, has helped some people with migraines. 

One study found that taking 400mg of vitamin B2 a day cut the number of migraines by more than 50 %.

In fact, one source said taking this much riboflavin is as effective for reducing migraine headache frequency as the beta-blockers, bisoprolol (Zebeta) and metoprolol (Lopressor). (Those drugs have side effects well worth avoiding including making your exercise harder to do well and much less effective at making you more fit and able. That’s a fattening effect which makes taking the riboflavin look a lot better by comparison.)

On the negative side. taking vitamin B2 by itself didn’t test as reducing the severity or duration of the remaining migraines.  And, the frequency reduction often took up to 3 months to fully kick in.  (Note too that taking riboflavin tends to turn your urine crayon yellow for a brief time after you take it.)

c) One source said that taking CoQ10 cut the frequency of headaches by about 30% and the number of days with headache-related nausea by about 45% in adults. Note that taking it in the ubiquinol form gives you higher blood levels of it and that it stays in your bloodstream longer.  That may well mean that taking 100 or 50 mg of ubiquinol at just before breakfast and another 100 or 50 mg of ubiquinol just before lunch would do an even better job!  Doing so also strengthens your heart, gives you more energy and tends to lower your blood pressure significantly if it’s high.   One study found doing this dropped high blood pressure by an average of 16 over 10.  That’s a big drop.  Many drugs for high blood pressure with all their side effects don’t do that well.

Doctors who have used both CoQ10 and ubiquinol find their patients get far better results taking ubiquinol.   And the fact that taking it helps lower high blood pressure suggests that it normalizes blood vessels which would tend to prevent migraines.

d) Other supplements that can help.:

Butterbur herbal supplements also have had good effects at 150 mg once or twice a day in cutting back migraine frequency up to 48%.  The fact that taking butterbur helps reduce smooth muscle spasm sounds like a reason why it works.

Feverfew has helped some people; but when I tried it I got a headache from taking it!  So I cannot give it a good review here even though it may work for others.

Taking 100 to 600 mg a day of alpha lipoic acid may also help somewhat.  The good news is that doing so has many other health benefits including being a non drug way to lower high blood sugar and increasing the effect of the other antioxidants you eat or take.

e) One of the more effective ways to stop migraines for some people is to discover and stop eating the foods that trigger them in you.

For example, one lactose intolerant boy was given milk at his school and promptly developed bad migraines which vanished when this was found out and he stopped drinking milk at school.

Phenylethylamine, tyramine, aspartame, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, alcohol, and caffeine have caused migraines for other people. 

The good news is that avoiding some of those things helps prevent fat gain or improves your health.

So just do that right away!

The artificial sweetener aspartame, sold as NutraSweet, found often in diet soft drinks acts as an appetite booster for sugary foods.  So simply not ingesting things that contain aspartame, is a double win.  You’ll find fat loss easier and may get fewer migraines!

Monosodium glutamate, MSG, tends to boost blood pressure due to its extra sodium and is also a proven fattener.  So simply not ingesting things that contain MSG is a double win.  You’ll find fat loss easier and likely will get fewer migraines! 

It’s tricky to avoid since they hide it behind many names such as autolyzed yeast.  Also, try to avoid using foods or spices that contain the catchall word, “spices” in the ingredients list.  This is often done to hide MSG being an ingredient.  (Annie’s yellow mustard is the only one I could find without the dreaded “spices” ingredient; so I recommend that one!)

Avoiding most packaged snacks helps avoid being fat due to the refined grains and junk oils that tend to be in them.  And it also helps avoid MSG and other MSG related flavor boosters often added to make the food more addicting.

Nitrates and nitrites in processed meats have been recently found to cause some significant increase in heart disease risk.  So things like NOT eating hamburgers at fast food places or eating sausage often or only eating nitrate and nitrite free bacon can help you avoid them.

Phenylethylamine is in chocolate and tyramine is in some aged cheeses and in some wines I think.  Given what they are in hopefully they don’t trigger migraines for you or if they do the effect is mild. 

This is also the case for alcohol and caffeine which can be triggers for some people.  Drinking alcohol in moderation instead of in excess also helps with fat loss.  So that’s a plus. 

And drinking tea can help some people who find the higher caffeine content of coffee to be a problem.

One source said this, “The identification of food triggers, with the help of food diaries, is an inexpensive way to reduce migraine headaches.”

So if you get migraines, delete aspartame and MSG from what you eat and drink. Cut way back on processed meats.  And use a food dairy to see if chocolate or the kind of wine you drink or cheeses you eat are triggers.

Summary:  A few migraine drugs can make you a lot fatter.  But you can possibly eliminate migraines and can for sure make them a lot less frequent and milder without ever taking those drugs.

Even better, most of the steps that will do that for you HELP you with fat loss and improve your health!