I’m still looking at mast cells. This is yet another intriguing possibility.  I found on line that mast cells are something that people on fibromyalgia blogs chatter pretty constantly about.  One woman claims that she went on a diet that eliminated all histamines (which are released by mast cells) and felt much better.  She figured she might be histamine intolerant rather than have fibromyalgia.  Histamine isn’t something I ever considered, especially since I overreact so badly to antihistamines.  However, keeping an open mind, if I wanted to eliminate histamine from my diet, there are two types of food to eliminate, foods that are high in histamine and foods that release histamine.  The list is long and eliminates almost my entire diet that I just put together.  There would be:

• No dried fruits, such as raisins, etc
• No citrus fruits, no bananas (although apples and watermelon are okay…huh)
• No aged cheese (all the good ones)
• No nuts (although “pure peanut butter” is okay, which gives me tummy cramps)
• No spinach
• No tomatoes
• No tuna (the only fish I actually like)

There are a bunch more that wouldn’t affect my diet as much as these (see http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-11175/everything-you-need-to-know-about-histamine-intolerance.html).

So what it really boils down to is that eating for fibromyalgia is a lot like having fibromyalgia.  There are a lot of contradictory recommendations.  Do you eat to boost your system or eat to inhibit things like histamines?  You can’t really do both.  Maybe eliminating food from my diet completely and surviving on protein powder and supplements is the way to go.  An intravenous diet while I sleep at night?  That seems almost as rational.

Okay, after getting that out of my system, I’m going to stay the course with what I decided on before.  I’m going to eat to boost rather than eat to eliminate.  My theory is that boosting will help keep what needs to be eliminated under control.  At least I think that would be a better shot than eliminating to boost.  To me, that seems like a better bet to balance the imbalances (with the caveat that sugar and preservatives, etc, do need to be eliminated).  Crisis over.  I’ll revisit this as needed….