Imagine being twenty years old, having just completed a six-month personal training course, and then suddenly not being able to get off the couch. Not from laziness — from pain so widespread that taking a shower is exhausting, and from a fatigue so heavy that getting dressed feels like a decision you have to budget for.
That was Amanda Love's reality. She's now a registered holistic nutritionist who specialises in fibromyalgia, and she spent a decade working out what actually moves the needle. I wanted to have this conversation because fibromyalgia is one of the most dismissed conditions I encounter, and the people living with it are so often told it's all in their head.
What fibromyalgia actually takes from you
Fibromyalgia is characterised by widespread pain and tenderness, profound fatigue, unrefreshing sleep, and frequently digestive symptoms that look a lot like irritable bowel syndrome. What the clinical description doesn't capture is the texture of daily life.
Amanda described things most of us never think about. Shower water hitting her skin was painful. Her shoulders were so tender that giving someone a hug hurt — so she stopped giving hugs. When she eventually could hug people again, she did it constantly, because you don't realise what you've lost until it's gone.
She also named the thing that makes this condition so isolating: you can look completely normal. She'd finished a demanding fitness qualification months earlier. There was no visible marker, nothing for anyone to point at — which invites the question she heard constantly: why can't you do what you used to do? If you're living with this, I want you to hear clearly that an invisible illness is not an imaginary one.
The pattern of trying everything
Amanda's path after diagnosis will sound familiar to anyone with a chronic condition. It took around ten months to get a diagnosis at all. Then came a pamphlet, a suggestion that she was probably just depressed — at twenty, unable to do anything, of course her mood had suffered — and a prescription.
She tried the standard medication for a few days, felt nauseous and unwell, and made a decision: she wasn't going to spend the next sixty years feeling like that. Next came physical therapy, then a course of trigger-point injections she found so excruciating she stopped after the second of three sessions.
I want to be careful here. Medication and physical therapy genuinely help some people with fibromyalgia, and nothing in Amanda's story means you should abandon treatment that's working for you — always have that conversation with your doctor. But her broader point stands: people with fibromyalgia try, and try, and try. That cycle is exhausting in itself, and it's why finding the right practitioner matters so much.
The turning point: food sensitivities
Amanda's shift came at twenty-one, when she started working with a practitioner who took her seriously and tested properly. The results showed sensitivities to gluten, soy, egg and dairy — she carried two genes predisposing her to gluten sensitivity, though she wasn't coeliac.
She removed those four foods and has been off them for over a decade. Of everything she tried, she's clear this was the single biggest lever.
What I find most instructive is that her diet hadn't been bad. No soft drink to speak of, not much fast food, plenty of vegetables and fruit, protein and carbohydrate at dinner. She'd been eating omelettes and wheat toast — foods most of us would call healthy. They simply weren't right for her body. This is the heart of why I don't hand out a single template at me&my wellness. "Healthy" is not one list of foods. It's the foods that work for the person eating them.
Testing matters here. Please don't eliminate four food groups on a hunch — that's a fast route to nutritional gaps and a difficult relationship with eating. Get proper guidance.
Stress, trauma and the things we don't say
Beyond food, Amanda pointed to stress as the thing she still works hardest on. She observed that many of the people she works with are high-achieving, go-go-go types who look after everyone else — and she asks them the obvious question: when are you taking care of you?
She also raised unresolved trauma. Amanda grew up through her parents' divorce and, at eight years old, had no way to speak up for herself. Only in recent years has she been able to voice it. Her view is that you have to address it, talk about it, and work toward forgiveness — not for the other person's sake, but because carrying it costs you.
When she went through a period of grief, she joined a structured grief group and gave it thirteen weeks, two hours every Thursday, with a workbook between sessions. That strikes me as exactly the right instinct: treating emotional recovery as something you schedule and show up for.
And her simplest insight was the one that landed hardest. When we hold things in, the stress compounds, and our immune function suffers for it. Speaking up is itself a relief. Find one person you can be honest with. If someone tells you they're fine, Amanda suggests digging a little deeper — they often aren't.
Sleep first, movement later
Here's where Amanda's sequencing differs from what most people expect, and I think she's right.
Clients come to her wanting to exercise. Her response is to work on restorative sleep first. If you're running on empty, you have no capacity for a workout — often not even for cooking a meal. Movement isn't the first priority; it's close to the last.
For sleep, her approach is practical: lower the stress load, use blackout curtains, cut blue light in the evening, keep your phone away from your head, don't eat heavily right before bed, and keep consistent sleep and wake times. She noted her own cortisol ran high at night — a pattern worth investigating with a practitioner if it sounds like you.
Then, when movement does come in, it starts genuinely small. Walking around the house. Stretching. Gentle yoga. Walking, she said, is amazing exercise and doesn't get enough credit. For a type-A personality this is the hard part — the instinct is to go hard, and going hard is precisely what sets you back.
She was also candid about supplements: some can support sleep and energy, but they're not a substitute for sorting out your food, your stress and your rest. Anything you take should be discussed with your practitioner, because the right choice depends entirely on you.
Getting curious instead of reaching for the aspirin
One line of Amanda's has stayed with me: we get a headache and go straight to the aspirin without asking why we have the headache.
Her alternative is simple, ongoing self-inquiry. How do I feel a couple of hours after eating that? Did I actually drink any water today? Am I getting this headache because I'm stressed, dehydrated, or because of something hormonal?
She was emphatic that this isn't calorie-counting or diet culture. It's not restriction or scorekeeping. It's noticing — building a working knowledge of your own body so you can make small, informed adjustments. Her phrase was that once you've removed what doesn't work, there's not much left to do but tweak. And she's generous about the tweaking: if you managed four nights out of seven, that's forward motion. Don't give yourself a hard time for falling short of perfect.
Key takeaways
- Fibromyalgia is invisible but very real — widespread pain, deep fatigue and poor sleep can make basic daily tasks genuinely difficult.
- Food sensitivities can be a major driver. Get properly tested rather than guessing, and work with a practitioner before removing food groups.
- A diet that looks healthy on paper may still contain foods your body can't tolerate.
- Prioritise restorative sleep before exercise. Consistent bed and wake times, darkness and no screens near your head are the foundations.
- Reintroduce movement gently — walking, stretching, light yoga — and resist the urge to go hard early.
- Talk about your stress and unresolved trauma with someone you trust, or with a professional. Holding it in has a physical cost.
- Ask why before you reach for the quick fix. Track how foods and habits make you feel.
What I love about Amanda's story is that it's a holistic one, and it had to be. No single intervention gave her her life back. It was food, then stress, then sleep, then trauma, then — eventually — movement, each addressed in an order that respected what her body could handle at the time. That's precisely how I work with clients at me&my wellness: not one magic change, but the right changes in the right sequence, built around you rather than around a protocol.
If you're in the thick of it right now, the most useful thing you can do is stop trying to fix everything at once. Pick the foundation — usually sleep — and get support for it. Then build.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au