For the past year and a half I’ve been getting migraine headaches. I get the whole aura thing with the jaggedy lines and then I usually get a dull headache that lasts for a couple of days and makes me so tired. I felt somewhat alarmed about this because I hadn’t had any in years. Really the worst ones I ever had were the ones I got while pregnant with Sarah. That’s 27 years ago. So I thought that maybe there was something majorly wrong with me.
So I looked on the internet (rather than go to the doctor) to find out what could be the cause. There were lots of suggestions – hormone replacement therapy, bright lights, stress, caffeine, aspartame etc. I tried changing my HRT dosage. I don’t take much because of all the worries about breast cancer. Anyway, that didn’t seem to do the trick. I tried wearing sunglasses a lot to cut down on bright lights.  As far as stress is concerned, I have a pretty non-stressful life. (except when people leave angry comments!) I only drink a little tea and no coffee or chocolate so I don’t ingest a lot of caffeine. Finally, I cut out aspartame in Equal, diet soda and wherever else I had been using it.
 Well, golly gee, the headaches stopped. Since last November I have only had two and they were when I had accidently had aspartame. So I am passing this along to you as a suggestion, if you are getting headaches, particularily migraine headaches, try cutting out all products with aspartame in them. If you want a non-caloric sweetener try Splenda, it’s a different formulation and, at least in me, doesn’t cause headaches.