Tofu or not tofu?

So, the Wild Rose De-tox cleanse is over. I feel great! Would highly recommend it, if you're into that sort of thing.

I did discover something new in the process. My body doesn't like soy. Since there's no dairy allowed on the cleanse, I was using soy milk. Then, around the middle of the cleanse, for the first time in years I bought some tofu.

At first, I thought my stuffiness was just the cleanse doing its thing. I did not correlate it with the soy milk I was drinking every day. Then I ate the tofu. Not only did I get stuffy, but also it got hard to breathe (but just a wee bit). I thought nothing of it... Maybe my resistance was down and I was getting a cold.

Everything cleared up after a few hours. The next day, I had the same tofu dish for lunch. Within a few minutes, I was stuffy and it was hard to breathe again. I thought to myself, "Ah! It's not a cold. My throat is partially closing. Interesting... This has never happened before."

Sure enough, it took about 3 hours, but it cleared itself up.

Just to test the theory, I tried again the next day. Same thing.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad enough that I felt I was in any danger. It was rather curious actually, since as far as I know, I'm not allergic to anything... The closest thing is probably anaesthetic... My experiences with that have led to me to choose not to have it whenever possible.

Anyway, after three tries with the tofu which resulted in same reaction each time, I stopped eating it. Ditched the soy milk too, and got some rice milk instead. The cold-like symptoms did not reappear after that. (And I also discovered that I quite like rice milk!)

My roommate is deathly allergic to shrimp and told me her allergy started in much the same way as my recent experience with tofu / soy, and progressively got worse until one day, she actually could not breathe after eating something that had touched shrimp.

Someone else told me that soy products can affect your hormone levels. I don't know much about that, but for whatever reason, my body seems happier when I don't feed it soy. I won't go so far as to call this an allergy, but I will say that it was an unexpected discovery about a food that I've only ever been ambivalent about, at best.

And so once again, I'm back onto my normal diet... Enjoying bananas and yogurt more than ever!