A symmetry recovery-based receiver in an asymmetrically clipped optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (ACO-OFDM) system is proposed to achieve LED nonlinearity in visible light communication systems. Based on the symmetric recovery characteristics of ACO-OFDM, a spectral diversity that combines odd and even sub-channels can be achieved in the time domain. Theoretical and experimental results show that the proposed scheme has a good performance when it is applied to a highly nonlinear visible light communication system. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional ACO-OFDM solutions. Furthermore, we find that the proposed method exhibits better performance when an increased modulation index leads to significant nonlinearity.