Fiber Magic
I likely qualify as a reasonably “normal guy.” I am in generally good health, I am happily married, I am gainfully employed, etc. The main problem I had was nagging and common headaches. Regularly I attributed the headaches to shifts in atmospheric pressure since I could tell you with clockwork accuracy whether it was going to rain later in the same afternoon or some time tomorrow just by how bad the headache was. Sometimes the headaches were incredibly painful. I regularly found myself taking Tylenol or Advil at least once a day, and often two or three times a day. Every now and then I would get a day off for good behavior.
And so I lived for years. Fearful for my liver with all the pain killers I was running through it, I sought the answer aggressively in little spurts when the headaches were particularly bad. No answer, no one’s blog, no medical web site had any obvious answer that didn’t involve prescription pain killers or migraine medicine. Then, without warning they vanished. Entirely. Then they came back again.
It was like a mystery to solve. I had found the secret without knowing it, or likely even realizing it until it was too late. Reminded that I had fixed it by the glaringly obvious return of the headaches instead of the subtle absence of them. I looked over the month long gap in headaches and nothing stood out especially clearly as the solution.
Like any well meaning office drone, I live my life bouncing back and forth between eating properly and well, not-so-much, as I try to keep a life sitting down at a computer from ruining my body. During the month of missing headaches I wasn’t on any diet plan, so that wasn’t it. I wasn’t working out, I wasn’t stress free, I wasn’t doing anything different. But I must have been, regular headaches don’t just stop without warning.
Then while walking through my local warehouse club store I turned down, of all places, the snack aisle. I remembered a while back having purchased a big box of Fiber One bars, and I remember enjoying them tremendously. They are after all, delicious. Probably the tastiest granola type bars made by anyone. Not thinking of the headaches that were once again just a part of my daily life, I picked up another box, purchased it, and wandered home.
The headaches vanished again, replaced by intense gas pressure in my gut, but I was paying attention this time. The secret appeared to be fiber. I once considered myself to be eating approximately correct amounts of things. I ate reasonably well thanks to my wife’s wonderful cooking. I had meats and veggies and starches and grains and fruits on a basically daily basis. Somehow it wasn’t enough. After a couple of weeks of eating a single Fiber One bar a day, the gas pain vanished as my body got used to higher amounts of fiber in my diet. The headaches stayed gone.
My track record at this point for around eight months of daily Fiber One bars is roughly twenty Tylenol, and not all of those were for headaches. From using two to six a day, to two per month on average. By adding a simple tasty granola bar to my daily routine, I now use virtually no pain killers for headaches at all. So to all you out there with unexplainable headaches, try a Fiber One bar every day for a little while. It may not be the solution you need, but for me it was the “magic pill” I’d been looking for without success for nearly a decade and I’m eternally grateful these delicious things were invented.