It should come as no surprise that I am the first user of Auralog: I built it to help me with my migraines. It has been helpful with preventing more migraines and giving me more of my own life, but I never expected it to uncover what might be the most surprising trigger thus far. And believe me, I have had some weird ones.
The Saturday pattern
On the main screen, Auralog has a heat map that shows your current year of migraines, backdated from today. I noticed that for the previous several months, I had migraines every Saturday like clockwork. Surely there was nothing special about Saturday with weather conditions, right?
I do not stay up any later Friday night, and I ease up or skip, if I am being honest, exercise over the weekend. So what was going on here?
Looking past the obvious
Auralog pulls potential triggers from the natural language you provide to it, whether typed text or dictation. The only outlying items in the detailed histories for each episode were a couple of dietary notes here and there. But that got me thinking: could this be a dietary issue?
I try to eat very well during the week, but I easily let myself slide on Saturdays.
I looked at the foods I had recorded for each of these Saturdays, and there was one item that reoccurred without fail: Slim Fasts. My wife enjoys them, and I like them too as a little snack drink. Slim Fasts are basically chocolate milk drinks made to help regulate your appetite, and they have a very distinct taste to them, presumably because they aspire to be as low calorie as possible.
But every Saturday, I was throwing down at least one of these Slim Fasts. Being a curious person, I set out to test this.
Testing the theory
I decided to have a Slim Fast on a Wednesday morning, but I had my migraine medicine on hand if there were signs of trouble. After maybe 20 minutes, I thought I had gotten it wrong, but then I got blank spots in my vision, and I had never felt so vindicated despite the onset of doom.
The following Saturday, I did not have a Slim Fast, and no migraine came. The following Thursday, I repeated the experiment with a Slim Fast and, lo and behold, another migraine.
The useful part was the pattern: One episode would not have told me much. Seeing several Saturdays in a row gave me something specific to investigate.
Why this matters
It has been a few weeks since that experiment, but after cutting Slim Fasts out entirely, my Saturdays seem fine again. It would certainly seem that the Slim Fasts were the culprit here, and perhaps they are. But it never occurred to me that I could make a tool that would help me identify migraine triggers.
The best part is that anybody can do this and effectively eliminate potential triggers to help them avoid migraines and embrace more of life on their own terms. So I am continuing to work on the trigger analysis features to keep them sharp and useful so that Auralog will always be the best it can be.
One last note
Slim Fasts may affect me adversely, but that does not mean they are necessarily bad for you personally. Something about my physiology and neurology just does not click with them. One thing that I have seen time and time again is that migraines and their triggers vary greatly from person to person.
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