I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia by a rheumatologist 6 years ago, but had been feeling ill for about 15 years. I'm 42 years old and male. My symptoms were pain in the neck and upper back and lower back. Severe headaches. Insomnia (I would only sleep about 5 hours per night, after that, the backpain would make it impossible to sleep). After waking up, I'd feel tired, 'broken' and 85 years old. The pain would become tolerable after 15 minutes of activity. My arms and hands would ache, and feel swollen, although they looked fine. Going to the toilet was always a problem. I often would fail to find words, I guess some would call this a 'fog of brain'. I would have several swollen and painful pressure points all over my body, aspecially in my arms and muscles in the back and neck. I refused any therapy or medication, because it was quite obvious that it was a so called 'exclusion diagnosis': I have a set of symptoms, but they don't make sense to the doctors, so after excluding all other possible diagnoses by doing the necessary tests, they decide to call it 'fibromiyalgia'.
All these symptoms went away almost instantly after I started an aspartame free diet. (Before the diet, I would eat and drink 'light' products from time to time, and I would add two grains of aspartame to my cup of coffee (I used to drink 4 to 6 cups of coffee a day, which makes a lot of aspartame.))
I'm in a euphoric state of mind, simply because since I have been on a aspartame free diet, I'm pain free and feel much stronger. I now am woken up by the alarm clock at 7 o'clock, rather than by the horrible back and neck pain, and migraine, at 4 am ... Since the beginning of August, I haven't felt sick again, and that is a good sign, because my symptoms were somewhat cyclic: every two weeks, the infection would flare up and I would feel really bad, and then slowly I would feel a bit better, only to feel very bad again two weeks later. All that has gone away now, so I'm hopeful to stay healthy now.
My advise to any person with a chronic condition with a broad spectrum of symptoms is to go on a diet that is free of any 'modern' additives.
EDIT: I took a better look at my bottle of sweeteners and it is actually a mixture of cyclamate and saccharine, not aspartame. This is what Wikipedia says - it is actually very scary: Cyclamate In the United States, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned the sale of cyclamate in 1970 after lab tests in rats involving a 10:1 mixture of cyclamate and saccharin indicated that large amounts of cyclamates causes bladder cancer, a disease to which rats are particularly susceptible. Cyclamates are still used as sweeteners in many parts of the world, including Europe.
