I was psyched when I fine tuned my Staple 2.0 smoothie/juice to near perfection, but that didn’t last long as I was getting some nasty sore throats. Well, actually, it was one long sore throat that lasted the entire month of July.
It’s hard to pinpoint the cause of things when you are throwing so many changes at yourself. Also, the sore throat came after a sinus infection. Was it strep throat? Was it the oats in the smoothie? Was it something else?
I’m reluctant to go to doctors. I guarantee I would have just been prescribed antibiotics or just told to take it easy. After the sinus cold was over in a few days, I had no other symptoms of a virus or other infection, so I decided to wait it out and do some trial and error.
It’s gotta be something in the smoothie, right? The sore throat started soon after I added oats into the mix. So I took them out. The sore throat remained. Were the berry seeds scratching my throat? I stopped smoothies all together, but the sore throat remained.
What made it tricky, is it varied in intensity day to day, hour to hour. So I would think it was coming to an end, just to wake up in the morning with it hurting again.
I was close to just giving up and going to the doctor, when it hit me. Besides the smoothie, I was snacking on Nutella like there was no tomorrow. Hmmm, could it be?
I stopped it and sure enough the sore throat ended.
What’s weird is that I have no other allergies that I know of. And according to WebMD and Wikipedia (aka my doctors), an allergy to hazelnut (Nutella) also is an allergy to cashews (which I can eat an entire can of with no problems–other than being a pig). Plus the symptoms of a tree nut allergy really don’t match up with just a sore throat. Who knows…I guess I should get tested some day.
The whole thing put a damper on my training progress. But I’m back on track now.