What is chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia?

That's how people with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia feel at their best. Still, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia (which is chronic fatigue coupled with insomnia and total-body aches and pains) are somewhat misunderstood even by well meaning docs. Because we cannot measure "energy levels," it's difficult to study these ailments well.

For years, the medical and lay communities didn't believe that these conditions really existed. But now there's not much debate about the fact that these are very real and very devastating illnesses that are marked by such symptoms as fatigue, insomnia, aches and pain, loss of libido, weight gain, and occasional brain fogs. The tricky part in diagnosing the two is that the conditions are triggered by many causes, ranging from hormonal to infectious, but they all have the same effect: That one little problem starts a process that causes your entire system to short-circuit.

Why? Because people with these conditions spend more energy on producing energy, so they have no extra energy for life. This lack of energy to do anything but process energy especially plays out in the hypothalamus gland in your brain - which balances the energy budget in your body.

That little neurological doo-dad that links your nervous system with your hormonal system uses more energy than any other place in your body. So when the systems that produce energy falter, you can feel exhausted, yet suffer from insomnia. In some cases, it also plays out in your muscles, which seem to get stuck (hence the aches and pains associated in the extreme form, fibromyalgia).

How? When muscles don't have energy, they get locked in a contracted position and you're unable to relax them, unable to supply them with fresh oxygen and blood, or remove waste materials, and that's what causes the pain (think writer's cramp or rigor mortis). Once the muscles are able to unlock, the pain flees faster.

To top it off, that decrease in usable energy also means that you lose energy in your heart; like other muscles, it struggles, too. Not only do people without their usual energy feel sluggish and less beautiful, they fulfill that feeling by gaining weight. The average weight gain of patients diagnosed with fibromyalgia or with chronic fatigue syndrome is 32.5 pounds.

It is as though you need more energy and try to provide that with more calories, but the calories do not do any good.

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