eventually as foods are eliminated you are left with very simple, very plain foods. i.e. plain rice. for a few weeks.
if you take out:
spice
alcohol
chocolate
sugar
several oils
some beans
mushrooms, fungi
wheat
milk
meat (I think)
seafood
and more that escapes my memory
you end up with not a whole lot left... Its been many years since I had exposure to the elimination diet but it is very hard work. I have seen someone graph their migranes in relation to succeeding at the elimination diet. The elimination program they were on involved eating plain food for 10 after their last migrane and then trying a sample from a set of (20?) pill-bottles which contained one of the eliminated substances. it looked like - 5 days after they had any foods they stopped having migranes.
But as one might begin to question - what is life without chocolate, wine, beer, sugar. Their migranes were not as bad as you describe yours, but when I met them they were gradually transitioning to the opinion of accepting the occasional migrane as long as they still had a glass of wine once a week.
Wow, your friend must really love wine. I don't drink alcohol, but is it really all that? I just assumed that most people have alcoholic beverages for the 'buzz'/intoxication.
So, I read a post a little while ago saying that asking the community for advice on personal problems was okay, and no one seemed to disagree strongly with this. Therefore, I'll just ask for some advice, and hope that I'm not accidentally going past some line. If I do, I apologise
I have had migraines for quite a while now. They started when I was a child, but were infrequent in those days. They got progressively worse as time went on, and things started to get quite bad when I was about 12. A few years down the line, I would have headaches for months at a time, with migraines popping up for a few days a month. It got worse from there. Now, I have had migraine-like symptoms for 10 months now. I say migraine-like because part of the definition of a migraine is that it lasts from about 3 hours to a few days. According to a neurologist I recently went to, I have transformative migraines, or wording similar to that. So I have all the symptoms of migraines, except they last for inordinate amounts of time. I've had an MRI, and it showed nothing wrong with my brain. According to the World Health Organisation, this is more disabling than blindness, and as bad as acute psychosis: http://www.migrainetrust.org/chronic-migraine You can see why its rather important to me that I get rid of/deal with this.
Now, I've tried quite a lot of things over the years, especially in the last two or so. NSAIDs do very little, and thing like migraleve (paracetamol with codeine) are a little better. Sumatriptan provides some relief, but it doesn't get rid of the migraine. At best it will knock me down to a weak migraine. I've tried taking propanalol (160mg) for half a year, and it does little to help. I was prescribd Amitiptyline (10mg) a week ago, but it hasn't had much effect. I was told to increase by 10mg it every two weeks until I hit 30mg. I've also tried cutting things out like chocolates, and dairy for a month. It didn't have any effect. I also don't have any caffeine. So this eliminates some common causes of migraines. My migraines sometimes respond to heat/cold applied to my head, but this is only some of the time, due to my migraines shifting in nature. Further, it only takes the edge of them. I've also tried taking magnesium supplements, but they had a negative effect on me i.e. strange dreams and insomnia. That just made my problems worse. Also, I've ruled out medication overuse.
So, does anyone have any recommendations? There should be a few people who have had experience with this level of migraines, and I expect they might be able to provide some advice. I'm not too optimistic, but I really need something that works.