A Great Mystery...Solved!

(I promise I'll have pretty pictures up again. Soon :)

For years, I've been dealing with this horrid smell in my nose and/or sinuses. It's too gross for me to describe on this here public blog. But it was bad. The smell itself always surfaced when I'd go swimming. I just thought it was H2O up my nose.

Turns out it IS H2O up my nose AND...

Drumrolls, please...

Dairy!

So, I've made this gluten crunch goodness 3x in a week. I've also been pool swimming 4x in the last week = H2O up my nose. This horrid stench has also made a not so pleasant comeback in well over a year.

It all makes sense.

I rarely ever, as in pretty much never, ate dairy this last jaunt in Hawaii. I always used rice or almond milk with my coffee...and before that, when I was eating dairy, I was still clueless about my gluten intolerance that I was really too fatigued to swim anyway. (I was unable to swim for nearly 4 months do to such extreme fatigue halfway out to the flag at 200 meters from shore that I was seriously afraid I would drown - only an incredibly weak breast stroke would get me back to shore completely exhausted).

I just assumed the smell was from gluten...but I've not had gluten since the Milo incident about a month ago. But I pretty much dropped dairy before I dropped gluten. And have only consumed relatively large quantities of it in this ginger crunch.

In the last 24 hours without dairy, the smell and sinus pressure is slowly going away. This discovery, to rid mynose of this smell FOREVER, is enough for me to never, ever, ever want to consume anything dairy again.

So while it's been an unpleasant week smell-wise, I'm grateful for the experience because now I know. For sure.