As a result of the dental surgery I had about a month ago, my system got really out of whack. It took about a week and a half of lots of veggies and very few carbs before I reset and felt normal again. (Kind of strange, waking up one morning and realizing that while before, I hadn’t been conscious of feeling bad, I finally felt “normal” again.)

Before the reset, during the time when I wasn’t feeling 100%, I would wake up almost every morning with a headache. Not a severe headache, just enough to be niggling.

My best way to “cure” my headaches, particularly the ones that show up in the morning, is to do what I call “carb fasting.”

Basically, this entails making my tea as usual, with a dollop of coconut oil as well as a bit of coconut cream. I figure I’m getting about 200 calories, most of it fat, with very few carbs.

(There are mornings when I feel really crappy and I do a hard fast, basically, black tea with nothing in it. But I haven’t had to do one of those for a long while, probably a month or more.)

I did the carb fast version of my mornings almost every day while I was at the writing marathon. The one day I didn’t, I felt bad.

So this last week, I’ve continued. I have only my tea with coconut oil and cream in it when I first get up, and I don’t eat anything more solid until later – I’ll generally eat my first meal sometime between 11 and 1, depending on how hungry I feel.

This has continued to really work for me. Though I’ve finally reset and I feel fine most mornings, I find that I’m not really hungry when I first wake up. On the few mornings when I have felt hungry, I’d told myself that I can eat after I have my tea. Only by the time I’ve finished my tea, I’m no longer hungry, and am not interested in eating anything.

There have been some mornings when by 11 AM, I’m ready to gnaw my arm off because I’m starving. There have been other mornings when I looked up and realized, huh, it’s 12:30. Maybe I should make something to eat.

Couple of other things: If you’d told me that I’d be fasting in the morning, and wouldn’t be hungry, even eight months ago, I would have laughed in your face. I’d tried fasting, more than once. It didn’t work for me, not really. I almost always felt hungry and miserable, and would get grouchy.

I started into this diet (Wahls’ Paleo Protocol, a nutritionally dense ketogenic diet) at the end of March, 2017. It took me a few weeks to get it locked in. Sometime after the start of April I began to get a handle on things. I didn’t discover the key to slaying the migraine beast until the end of April (which, for me, meant getting off ALL the migraine meds, treating my migraines naturally. Have never looked back.)

It took several more months on the diet before I found myself “forgetting” to eat. I’d skip breakfast or lunch and wouldn’t realize it until later.

Now, I’m regularly fasting. Every morning. I don’t understand why this works so well for me right now, just eating two meals per day. I suspect it’s because I’m getting enough fat in my diet. (I’m supposed to get 70-80% of my calories from fat in my diet. When I wasn’t getting enough fat, all types of fasting didn’t work.)

I do have to be careful and eat enough during the meals I do have, or I’ll end up snacking which leads to me gaining weight, which is currently not a good thing.

Will I skip breakfast for the rest of my life? Who knows? Generally, my habits only last 3-4 months. Maybe come fall I’ll want breakfast again. Who knows?

I just know that currently, this works for me. I feel so good by the time I’ve finished my tea, ready to start my day, to write.

And speaking of such….