Brain Fog & Head Pressure: Triggered by Eating (Anything)

Symptoms Neurological
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#1

Eating (anything) triggers a huge wave of brain fog, fatigue, face/head/ear pressure, and autophony in my ear. All on the left side - left ear, left side of head and face.

I have all the classic neuro symptoms - crippling brain fog, high anxiety, delayed vision, slurred speech, etc.

I know many of you suffer from neurological symptoms and there are thousands of posts on the topic so I’m going to concentrate this post and hope to hear from other members with a similar experience - Neuro symptoms (Brain fog and the rest) being triggered by Eating

The brain fog onset is immediate before digestion kicks in - it isn’t a food intolerance or digestive issue. I’ve done all the diets and gut cleansing. I’m convinced that it is nervous system dysfunction and/or neurosteroid imbalance where my brain is reacting improperly to certain stimuli (eating in my case).

Benzos (GABA modulator) lessen the severity of this phenomena, further pointing to nervous system dysfunction / neurosteroids firing improperly.

Over the 5+ years of dealing with this, I’ve had to radically alter my schedule to avoid eating any time I need to use my brain.

Eager to hear from other members with a similar experience. Anything that has helped, any doctors you’ve seen that are knowledgeable and have helped. I’ve been researching this for years and have a lot of context to offer for anyone interested in connecting and exploring treatment options.

3 Likes
#2

I think its Histamin

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#3

Interesting and thanks for sharing this. Do you have a similar experience with eating or an issue with histamine?

#4

Yes i have heavy Histaminproblems…

1 Like
#5

Yes I also had this exact problem only all of my issues are on the right side and in the right ear. Since recovering I don’t really feel any of this anymore, occasionally I’ll get a little feeling of irritating pressure in the inner right ear but nothing severe like it was. Like you since so much was able to trigger it, it feels like some intense neurological dysregulation where the nervous system got stuck in a loop somehow and couldn’t get out. These reactions from the gut with me would begin immediately as they hit the stomach too. I haven’t tried benzos so I can’t comment on that.

My recovery was long range with a lot of up’s and downs but see my last post on the final push that got me out of this. Weird question but do you have strange reactions to fish? Using cooked fish specifically was part of what got me out of this whatever happened, salmon specifically but a while back cooked bluefin tuna specifically was able to give me energy when nothing else was able to get me further though the benefits of that didn’t stick like they did with cooked salmon and left me feeling more jittery while salmon initially before it was just more energizing to consume made me a lot more calm and emotional.

#6

Encouraging to hear you recovered from this.

I haven’t noticed a reaction to fish but I’ll keep an eye on it now that you mention it. I wonder if Omega 3/6 would have a similar effect?

From your posts, it sounds like the things that worked for you are Vitamin K2, Methyl B12,Charcoal, and Propolis. Is that about accurate? Anything else of note that you feel really made an impact?

I’m taking vitamin K2 and vitamin B12 (cyanocobalamin, not methylated). I haven’t tried charcoal or Propolis.

#7

Yeah I don’t take the charcoal anymore but I started using that every day for a while at very small doses (I can’t remember exactly how long I took a tiny sprinkle out of a teaspoon however much that was a couple times a day, think morning and night.) I also can’t remember exactly how long I did that for but it helped control the brain burning early on I believe I started that around when I first integrated K2 which was one of the initial things that gave me a spark of energy and feeling back. I started that way before being successful in integrating the D3 which was a multi-month battle of trying to get my body to properly accept it.Methyl-b12 was crucial and early on I actually lost tolerance for it but had a very strange way I was able to integrate it again. I had to up the amount of coffee I was drinking to the evening too and then I was able to tolerate the 1000 mcg again, then I had to work my way up to 2000 mcg again. Much later it was beneficial for me to switch to a methyl-b12 supplement with only rice flour as an iingredient which also helped calm the brain burning that was still going on at a lower degree around when I did that. I can’t remember the exact supplement lineup I had at the time where upping the coffee I was drinking was able to help me get my methyl-b12 back but I think I was on the capsule of propolis at the time. Propolis itself was able to consistently get my energy levels up just that much more and give me back more cognition. Not much but it was and still is crucial to keeping myself afloat, I still take a capsule of it a day. I had a bad reaction to cyan-B12 which I initially tried as I was losing tolerance for methyl which completely backfired as it almost gave me a panic attack, severe depression, complete sexual dysfunction again (though it was minimally functioning at the time, just barely so really anything was able to knock it offline again), and worse anhedonia. I bounced back though after trying cyan-so it wasn’t a huge deal.

Post-D3 integration was when I was getting a lot of dietary modulations of symptoms which in hindsight was probably a good sign because it meant my body was having responses to things in general whereas before D3 eating any food was essentially the same unless it was something that made the burning brain and with it anhedonia and sexual dysfunction even worse.

Here is the interesting thing about that specific brain burning and head pressure thing that seemed to be connected in some way to eachother. The initial thing that was able to control it was the small dose actived charcoal, I would consume a little of that after a meal earlier on initially because I found that if I had it later after eating that it was able to beat back that brain burning reaction which earlier on eating just about anything increased it to some degree with things like soy sauce for example being the worst offenders (which may have implied it was due to some glutamate or histamine storm triggering itself in chain reaction to itself? I’m not sure and can only speculate it could have been an entirely different immune mediator that got out of control from mast cells). Way later what completely kicked it out was eating some dried cinnamon every day and did so not surprisingly as this became a trend right after it hit my stomach. I integrated it back onto the breakfast I was eating every day and I prepare that at night and while preparing it I always make sure to have some raw cinnamon while doing so. Since this sort of had the same effect of activated charcoal in the beginning I’m wondering if there is something being produced in my guts that was perpetuating the immune aspect of the condition and the compounds in cinnamon along with that fact that it is a powder was able to completely neutralize the pathogen responsible for doing so not only by it’s compounds but by the fact that the powder was able to suffocate it directly not allowing it to do much eventually leading to a long term gut microbiome shift.

At some point after that the final push to get out was just repeatedly rebounding off of the cooked salmon meat which I imagine is also a neuro-immune loop with beneficial effects for the condition that I was exploiting since raw salmon doesn’t do anything but be extremely tasty.

#8

So raw salmon doesn’t have the same cognitive benefit that raw salmon does for you - interesting.

Soy seems to be a big offender for me as well.

I’m not very familiar with Propolis - why do you think this has helped you? What’s the science? Do you have a link to the Propolis you take?

Do you think your issue was histamine-focused? Did you ever try a low histamine diet?

#9

Yeah on the fish thing, I have no idea why. Soy itself doesn’t seem to be a huge factor unless it’s a heavily processed soy product like soy sauce or tofu (tofu would bring the brain burning on even worse than soy sauce). I remember getting a cognitive boost from honey itself but I can’t consume honey without my guts throwing a fit so I tried that and never went back. It just has a lot of polyphenols I figured would be good for inflammation in general. The mix of them you get depends on the origin of the propolis, I don’t really know what it is in my current supplement but I tried a couple brands and they all pretty much do the same thing. I know with people in this boat things with high polyphenol loads can be a bit of a gamble so use caution. In my case increasing them from sources where I’d be getting a lot trended towards helping me.

I thought about the histamine component a lot. It feels like I could sometimes sky rocket my histamine levels but my body was unresponsive to it like it was just sitting there not being used much like cortisol that felt like the same thing was happening. Way before this all happened if I had something with a lot of histamine I tended to feel more jittery and over stimulated. Post PFS it would just feel like my brain was on fire and I’d get far more fatigued and brain foggy, Currently that’s normal again, my stress response has also returned.

#10

When you say your stress response has returned - what do you mean by that? In a good way?

How long did it take being off all 5AR inhibitors before the brain fog and eating-induced brain fog began improving for you?

#11

I can’t even remember how long it’s been specifically, I’d need to go back to my own story and see if there’s any note of that but I’m pretty sure well over 1 1/12 years now, may not be 2 yet. I mean my anxiety response plus adrenaline to various levels. When I first crashed I lost all of that and could only feel severe anxiety ironically but no bodily response besides a little tension which felt super weird and unlike anything I ever felt before.

#12

I see from your older posts, you’ve been dealing with histamine issues for several years. Did you ever have histamine issues before finasteride? Have your symptoms improved over time? If so, is there anything you’ve done/tried (diet, supplements, other) that have helped?