Eight Years of Blood Tests, Two Diets, One Migraine
I get migraines. I hate them.
In 2022, I bought a book: The Migraine Miracle by Josh Turknett, a neurologist. His argument, as I understood it: the modern diet inflames a brain that is already sensitive, and cutting sugar and grain calms it down. Eat closer to the way people ate before farming. Fat, meat, vegetables, almost no carbohydrate.
I tried my version of it: high fat, lots of meat, lots of veggies, and stayed on it until 2023.
What happened
My migraines did not get better. Not fewer, not shorter, not milder.
My cholesterol moved. In 2023 it reached 210 mg/dL and my LDL reached 105. Both over the line. Neither had crossed it in the four years before, or any time before in my life.
What I eat now
I stopped. Since the 2023 blood panel, I have eaten mostly beans, nuts, olive oil, vegetables and oats.
Three years later: cholesterol 172, LDL 79, triglycerides 44, HDL 80. My LDL-to-HDL ratio is 0.99, the lowest it has ever been. Every lipid number is back inside the lines, and all four are better than they were in 2019.
My migraines are mostly the same.
Every number, 2019 to 2026
Pick a panel, hover a year, or open the table under the chart. Each test is drawn against its own reference range, so tests with different units can share one axis.