Develop healthful eating patterns to strengthen your immune system and eliminate chronic conditions such as fibromyalgia. While there is no specific fibromyalgia diet for all cases, different symptoms may suggest ways of improving your fibromyalgia symptoms through diet. Chronic fibromyalgia sufferers often have one condition amplifying another (or several others); relieving even one can substantially increase your quality of life. To reverse fibromyalgia symptoms, you have to follow a fibromyalgia diet based on fresh, healthy, unadulterated food and water. The fibromyalgia diet requires you to pay attention to what you eat, how often, how much, and how well you eat. The following healthy eating guidelines should form the basis of your fibromyalgia diet and be slowly incorporated into your lifestyle:

• Increase the Food Choice Variety and Combinations - Eat a wide variety of foods in a variety of amounts and combinations to help ensure that you are ingesting a wider range of essential vitamins, minerals and fatty acids
• Incorporate More Organic in Your Diet - Avoid vegetables, fruits and meats that are artificially produced with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, fertilizers and steroids. The chemicals applied to the plants often destroy essential soil microbes in an already deplete soil environment, resulting in plants that have a drastically reduced nutritional value.
• Eat small meals throughout the day as often as every three hours
• Maintain a balanced food composition of complex carbohydrates, healthy plant fats, essential fatty acids, lean animal protein and vegetable protein
• Avoid junk food and fast food
• Drink 8 ten ounce glasses of purified and/or distilled water daily
• Remove as many artificial ingredients, additives, and chemicals from your nutritional plan as possible
• Avoid caffeine, sugar and as many unnecessary drugs as possible
• Monitor your food intolerances and allergic reactions - If your body overreacts to certain foods, it could worsen conditions ranging from digestive troubles (gas, bloating, constipation, or diarrhea) to fatigue, headache or migraine, joint pain, mood disorders, muscle aches, and skin problems.

In following the basic guidelines of the fibromyalgia diet listed above, you will notice a tendency to feel better when refined sugar, caffeine, alcohol, fried foods, red meat, and highly processed foods, are kept to minimum in the diet. Many people benefit from cutting out all sugar for a month, which can severely reduce the craving for sweets, and allow your body to better manage its sugar intake when you add it back in. Eliminating all forms of caffeine, fried, processed and fatty foods can eliminate cravings for these items and allow you to see if they may be contributing to your fibromyalgia symptoms.

Eating a healthier diet can have long-term benefits for any individual suffering from fibromyalgia syndrome. Slowly start to add greater quantities of raw or lightly cooked fruits and vegetables throughout the day. Substitute high fat meats with fish, lean poultry and vegetable protein. Choose foods that are lower on the glycemic index, a scale that ranks foods from 0 to 100 depending on how fast they are digested and converted to glucose (sugar). Examples of low glycemic index foods that can be included on the fibromyalgia diet are: barley, grapefruit, beans, apples, pears, peaches and oatmeal.

And don't forget it is vital to drink plenty of purified and/or distilled water and take good vitamin and mineral supplements to be sure that you are getting proper nutrition.

Also note that non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs) like aspirin, ibuprofen, or acetaminophen that you may be using for pain management can tear down the lining of the gut and intestinal tract. If you have any predisposition to food intolerance or digestive disturbances, heavy use of these medications may make them worse, and these symptoms are very common in fibromyalgia. If you have never had digestive problems before, a steady regimen of NSAIDs may cause them to develop. Infrequent or occasional use should not be a problem, but consistent or daily use will likely pose a health risk over time. NSAIDs can worsen the vitamin deficiencies and digestive problems so common in fibromyalgia, while often doing little to relieve pain in the long term. It may be a good idea to minimize your use of these fibromyalgia pain relief medications.