Nothing reduced my first attempts at eliminating the huge pain factor than proceeding through an elimination diet. It was then the first milestone shed light onto an overused, underfed body.  I have been tempted to rewrite the information I used myself and offer it here as a course to help others.  But more on that at the end of this article.

The most common types of elimination diet involves removing specific foods or ingredients from your diet because you and your doctor think they may be causing allergy symptoms. Common allergy-causing foods include milk, eggs, nuts, wheat, and soy. Your doctor will supervise this diet over a few weeks. There are usually several steps to this diet.

You may not realize it, but the foods you're eating every day could be slowly corrupting your health and shortening your lifespan. But how do you know? For many people, toxic foods are hard to spot, especially for those who've already cleaned up their diets and feel like they are eating healthy.  If you'd like to see if certain foods are causing you increased discomfort try the mini plan below.

Phase 1: Elimination

For at least 6 weeks follow these guidelines:

• Avoid all known and suspected food allergens.  These are the foods that make you feel "funny" after consumption.  Yes, you haven't lost your mind, there are food out there that make you feel "weird".
• Avoid all gluten-containing foods.  Here you must read labels as wheat is a product consistently in our daily fare.  No more wheat breads, tortillas, muffins, cereals, cakes, pizza, crackers, pasta, or pretzels.  Look for gluten-free alternatives.
• Avoid all dairy products.
• No more soda. EVER!
• Ween off of caffeine products.  The object is to reduce the consumption until there is NONE.  Yes, you read that correct.  Caffeine excites nerves. Excited nerves in fibromyalgia cause pain.  You can do it.  I once was an avid coffee drinker, but no more.
• I know this is a bit overwhelming.  But you will be surprised at how well your body will respond to these choices during the month.  The first week may feel uncomfortable as your body detoxes.  Drink teas that are calming such as chamomile and take several "tubbies" using Epsom Salts bath.  Don't give up thinking your dying.  You're not.  Your body is just releasing the "bad stuff".  

Phase 2: Reintroduction

• After one month on the Fibromyalgia Elimination Diet reintroduce ONE new food at a time.  Try a category that you feel may not be a bother such as dairy.  Introduce milk back into your diet digesting a small amount twice daily.  
• Wait three days.  Eat this product twice daily during this time recording any reactions so you remember:-)
• After three days introduce another food back into your diet.  Keep recording to see what foods are the culprits and may be starving your well-being.  

This is a "nutshell" diet and doesn't fully walk you through the process.  Nonetheless, It is a beginning point to see if there are any food sensitivities in your diet.  For me, I took a nutritional course that offered emails of support as I completed the process.   I can tell you it was the most thought-provoking period of my life. Food sensitivities that plagued me before virtually unnoticed came out in full sense as my diet continued.  It was a real eye-opener.  

Unfortunately, after careful evaluation my own elimination diet needed some tweaking for patients who suffer from fibromyalgia.  I am in the midst of completing the F-Elimination Diet that will be offered as a complete tool for those who truly want to find out all food allergies/sensitivities and how to prevent them.  It will offer daily support, something we all need here some days, along with a hands-on approach to make the process doable.  If you are interested in receiving information on this and tired of being in daily pain fill out the form below for updates when it will be posted.  

You must practice Somatic Breathing exercises each day to open up the pathways of movement and flow in your body.  It is through continued practice that you will find more relief day by day.

Take a few moments to connect with the overall sense of your body.  How would you describe your sense on the right side of your body with the left side?  Is there a place you can zone in on and make it a resting place to come to when there are days of stress and pain?

Finding a Resting Place

1. Ask your body for permission to explore.
2. Close your eyes and begin a deep, slow, consistent breath.
3. Look inside your body for an area that feels OK.  This area may not have positive sensations, but they are not painful.
4. Then look for parts in your body that you can not feel.  These places are numb or just blank.  Usually these are areas we subconsciously disconnect from.  It could be your feet, legs, hands, fingers, or pelvis.  Notice if these areas contain any stress.
5. Take a few moments and use your breath and sense your way into one of the numb or disconnected locations where your mind is resting.  
   
6. Breathing in feel that part of your body.
7. Breathe out and feel that part of your body again.
8. Complete four breaths each time asking, "What am I sensing in this area now?" "Does it feel more connected?" "Less connected?"
   
9. Do this exercise later in the day with different areas of your body.
10. Practice this each day.  
    

Now that you're beginning to to understand the benefits of Somatic Breathing exercises, you can go further to open up the pathways of movement and flow in your body.  

Take a few moments to connect with the overall sense of your body.  How would you describe your sense on the right side of your body with the left side?  

If both sides of your body feel equally comfortable or uncomfortable you may want to try the Circle Breath. Circle Breathing utilizes the entire body in one breath to relax.

Circle Breathing

1. Ask your body for permission to explore.
2. Close your eyes and begin a deep, slow, consistent breath.
3. Look inside your body for an area free of pain (could be your ear, forearm).
4. Relish in the sensation of this pain free area.
5. Now allow yourself to feel where your body hurts.

1. Begin the Circle Breath: Breathe up the middle of your body to the top of your head.
2. As you breath out, sense your breath moving down the back of your head, neck, mid-back, and through your lower back and out through your tailbone.  Imagine your breath cascading down both sides of your legs.
3. Repeat several times.  

If you've been practicing your somatic breathing exercises throughout the day it is certain you've experienced some relief of pain.  It’s based on the fact that there is a “feedback loop” between your muscles and your brain.  Healthy  relaxation of a muscle depends on the integrity of communication throughout this loop. The muscle and its tendons are loaded with nerve sensors that tell the brain what the muscle is doing.  The brain has a “sensory” part, which “feels,” and a “motor” part, which “drives” (controls) the muscle.

One important intervention to add to your routine is the power of curiosity to help interrupt that fear factor that often marks the first downward slide into the pit of pain. If we learn to sustain a playful and mindful focus on the sensations of our body, then we stop waiting for our worst fears to be fulfilled.  Instead, we begin to discover how our somatic experiences feed into each other and how better patterns can be set.  


Ground Yourself

1. Begin somatic breathing with long, slow breaths.
2. Feel your body relax in a lying or sitting position.
3. Get a sense of your feet and how they are connected to the earth.  How do they feel on the couch or bed? Gently shift your weight from foot to foot.
4. Now explore your calves and thighs.  Notice the connection to your feet.  Is there a difference between the right or left leg?
5. Allow your body to shift to any other area that is requiring your attention.  What does it feel like?  Can you add words to describe it?  Tight, loose, blocked, flowing, tingly, congested, heavy, empty, cold, or warm? Try to shift away from the usual description like sore and painful.   Zero in on the type of pain or uncomfortable feeling you are sensing.  
6. Allow your sensations to be drawn to an area of the body that feels whole and complete.
7. Let your mind wander about your body in places that require attention.  Be sure to shift back to areas that are pain free to gently remind yourself this is what you want to experience.  As you do, ask yourself these questions: What kinds of sensations are associated with being stuck?  What part is this part of my body touching?  How does this feel to me?  Can I feel any vibrations in my body?  Can I hear or sense anything here?  
8. Continue for as long as you like.

If you enjoy the art of Vincent van Gogh, you'll enjoy taking a walk in his footsteps before he became the  well-known artist of  today.  Van Gogh's heart is miffed as he struggles to find his true calling in life and win his brother's admiration.  A heart-rendering story that only Hermann can bring with a lyrical accountability of a man destined for fame.  

Though Vincent van Gogh is one of the most popular painters of all time, we know very little about a ten-month period in the painter’s youth when he and his brother, Theo, broke off all contact. In The Season of Migration, Nellie Hermann conjures this period in a profoundly imaginative, original, and heartbreaking vision of Van Gogh’s early years, before he became the artist we know today.
     In December 1878, Vincent van Gogh arrives in the coal-mining village of Petit Wasmes in the Borinage region of Belgium, a blasted and hopeless landscape of hovels and slag heaps and mining machinery. Not yet the artist he is destined to become, Vincent arrives as an ersatz preacher, barely sanctioned by church authorities but ordained in his own mind and heart by a desperate and mistaken spiritual vocation. But what Vincent experiences in the Borinage will change him. Coming to preach a useless gospel he thought he knew and believed, he learns about love, suffering, and beauty, ultimately coming to see the world anew and finding the divine not in religion but in our fallen human world.
     In startlingly beautiful and powerful language, Hermann transforms our understanding of Van Gogh and the redemptive power of art.-amazon.com

Somatic Breathing Therapy is a form of conscious breathing that teaches you to breathe fully and freely and helps you:

• Get more oxygen to your body and brain
• Recharge your energy
• Reduce stress
• Integrate issues from the past
• Focus your attention
• Relax
• Alleviate pain

It also helps you step back from emotional reactions and access the intelligence of your own body-mind, and establish new patterns and responses in your life. It offers an increased freedom of expression, and a connection to your true self as well as an overall feeling of personal empowerment.

Pain is often the reason an individual will explore Somatic Breathing.  Pain is a signal to let us know that we have been injured or ill.  Pain is also from tension and discomfort caused by how we respond to stress.  In its ultimate form, pain is an essential part of our natural survival system, warning us that something is wrong and motivating us to give our body urgent attention.  Yet, at this point in our journey we want nothing to do with this bazaar signaling response.  

The first stepping stone to Somatic Breathing is an invitation or permission to simply explore your own body. This is often the last thing a sufferer of fibromyalgia may want to to do.  After all, days are spent subliminally hovering over your own domain brandishing any connection with pain.  Yet, in order to understand what is happening to your body, this is the first and essential component that must be proceeded with caution to get to the root of the problem.  

Try the following exercise each day

1. Ask your body for permission to explore.
2. Close your eyes and begin a deep, slow, consistent breath.
3. Look inside your body for an area free of pain (could be your ear, forearm).
4. Relish in the sensation of this pain free area.
5. Now allow yourself to feel where your body hurts.
6. Take this at your own pace. If one area hurts too much, find another more tolerable area.
7. Focus on that area and allow that area to expand, take up as much space as needed.  Don't try to change anything.
8. Continue breathing.
9. Next, return to the pain free area sensing as you breathe in and out.
10. Repeat this process several times by shifting back and forth through various areas in your body.  
11. Send your breath to all those painful areas you sense.

This is a pain relief process and builds over time.  You must consistently work this breathing exercise into your daily routine to feel substantial effects.  It is simple and can be done when you wake in the morning and retire for the evening.  As you continue your practice your "pain-free" areas will begin to expand.  

Dealing with chronic low energy and pain can be difficult, but if you add a smoothie to your afternoon, you can boost liver and immune function, which will improve your energy reserve. The carbohydrates will give you energy while  the protein will help slow their absorption into the bloodstream, giving a more  sustained release of energy throughout the morning.  It will also get that "sludge" out of your muscles and joints promoting better flexibility.  Coconut oil scrubs away all those opportunistic viruses, bacteria, and yeast that invade the body from time to time.  

I have found this works best on an empty stomach in the morning ensuring good energy levels throughout the day.

Smoothie Recipe


1/4 cup unsweetened cranberry juice
3 - 4 frozen strawberries
1/4 cup frozen blueberries
2 - 3 small pineapple slices
1-2 tsp. ground flaxseed
1 -2 tsp.. coconut oil (begin small, coconut can be a laxative)
1/2 tsp. raw honey
1/2 - 1 scoop protein powder (rice or pea)
filtered water to  barely  cover fruit

Place all in a blender. Whirl until smooth.  Unsweetened cranberry juice will prevent further UTI infections if you are prone to these.  Rice and Pea protein powders are hypoallergenic and will prevent further flare ups.  

Adrenaline, or epinephrine, is a stress hormone secreted from the adrenal glands on the kidneys. It plays a major role in preparing the body for a fight-or-flight reaction in threatening environments. An adrenaline rush is a sudden increase in the secretion of adrenaline from the adrenal glands. This happens when the brain communicates to the glands that there will be a need for a fight-or-flight response. The cause of an adrenaline rush need not be an actual physical threat but can also be an imagined threat, strenuous exercise, heart failure, chronic stress, anxiety or a disorder of the brain or adrenal glands.

But sometimes our bodies get out of whack.  Individuals who are having issues with a  non-functioning autonomic system or patients of dysautonomia experience such adverse affects usually between the hours of 10 pm - 2 am.  One such person explains the following:

"It registers for a moment before it happens – I’m consciously aware that I’m asleep. Peacefully asleep, but I can sense that’s all about to change. Like the calm before the storm.  I awake with the loud drumbeat of my heart in my ears and bolt upright. I scan the dark room to orient my surroundings. Good, I’m at home. Good, the BF is here, and no one else. Good, I’m not dead. I can hear the hurried breaths of air being forced in and out of lungs, and pray it is mine. A heightened perception of awareness  invades my senses and suddenly I am mindful of every object in the room. The comforter has drifted two inches to the left from the last time I awoke, the soft hum of the fridge has increased one decibel, and I don’t like the scheming look the nightstand is giving me. I am overcome with the most basic instinct of survival: to fight it out, or flee. But there is no one to fight, and nowhere to flee. I try to slow my breath while whispering over and over, “There is no danger here. There is no danger here.”  Eventually I lie back down, content for the moment to neither fight nor flee.  After all, I am still in my reindeer jammies." - musing of a dysautomiac

There is little medical research for answering reasons why such things happen at night.  But, it is noted that many fibromyalgia patients experience such invasive consequences periodically throughout the month. Another man, emud on MedHelp, experiences such events and writes:

"For the last two weeks I haven’t been able to get to sleep. I was going nuts. I would start to drift off, then a surge of adrenaline would wash over me and that would be the end of sleep. Determination or laziness would keep me trying to sleep all night until I would drift off for a few hours out of sheer exhaustion. Not enough sleep, if it was sleep at all, but at least I was able to function. 

I started trying all the usual suspects in sleepless remedies. Chamomile tea, over the counter sleep aids. No good. While watching a TV show, I was envious of the characters that had pot because of how relaxed they looked and how easily they went to sleep. Still, my faith and regard for my health would not let me turn to drugs or drink. Whatever was going on, I needed to solve it or suffer. 

In my search for help, one piece of advice was very important to get started with. Whatever is happening is not meant to hurt you. The affects hurt, certainly, but the root of the problem is not meant to hurt you. I’ll explain in my theory. My theory is that something happened to trigger the adrenaline surge the first time. For me, I can’t remember what it was. That’s why this was so baffling to me. I don’t know what started it. But fear of it happening again, of not getting to sleep again, triggered a response from my mind. If sleep was going to be a problem, then it was going to help me out with that. (The mind is an amazing and complicated organ.) See it like the immune system deciding to attack some part of the body. It happens, and the affects are harmful, but it was just a response to something body thought it had to defend against. So my mind set up an alarm system. If I began to sleep it would send out adrenaline to keep me awake. Even when I was so desperately tired I couldn't have been afraid of anything, the alarm system was still set up in my mind. It got to where even thinking about sleep would bring on the surges." 

But it is the last paragraph that had a solidifying effect on me. 

"It was that last side effect that really led me to understand what was happening. And using advice I gleaned from countless anxiety websites and blogs, I talked to myself. Yeah, not something I thought would lead to a cure, but there it is. I knew I had to tell my mind that sleep was safe. My mind was confused and needed to be reset about sleep. So, last night I focused on all the happy memories of sleep. I repeated in my mind things like, “sleep is safe. Sleep is good.” I made sure to include the feelings of safety, comfort, peace. The memory of a truly comfortable spot in the bed, of clean soft sheets. I did this right as I was falling asleep until there was no response to the thought of sleep. And I am happy to say I got seven hours of peaceful sleep last night."

I read it twice.  Oh, how I can commiserate that medicines just don't seem to work on your heightened awareness when your body is in overdrive and in that condition!  But his words laid rest, yes, it felt as though my mind was setting off an alarm clock to spring me into action instead of resting.  For me, as this condition first manifests, I feel a jolt of electricity cursing through my body that immediately awakens me into full cognitive mode no matter how tired I was.  So, I began emud's technique.  I began speaking to mind throughout the day reminding it how I love sleep.  How sleep is beneficial for me.  Most importantly, despite unwelcomed meetings and doctor's appointments it is OK to sleep soundly the night before hand.  It will better prepare me for what lies ahead.  I must remind my mind there is nothing I can prepare for at that moment when I am under the covers. 

 I can tell you the last three days I slept very soundly.  More so than I have before.  I will continue to do this new mantra every quiet moment I have throughout the day.  I will essentially begin to reprogram my mind.