Guest post by Marina K. Villatoro, Travel Experta.

Before I delve into the meat of my story, I think I should give a little background so it’s easy to see how the move to Guatemala has fully changed my body’s normality. For almost ten years of my life my profession was fitness instructor. I taught anywhere from 2 – 4 hours of high impact aerobics and spinning daily. Basically, exercise and me go hand-in-hand and if I don’t get my dose of exercise, I am usually grouchy and have too much built up energy.

Living in Costa Rica, I stopped being a fitness instructor but remained loyal to my body’s needs and went to the gym 4 – 5 days a week.  Although, I must confess, throughout my career as a fitness professional I have grown a major dislike for gyms seeing them as breeding grounds for germs.  Yet, I never fully suffered any particular illness from it, I just don’t like to see others leaving sweat on machines I’m about to use.

Moving to Guatemala allowed me to indulge a bit. Instead of me being the personal trainer, I hired one to work out with me! He comes to my house 3 times a week, and I’m extremely happy with him.

So what’s all this unhealthy talk? Well, let’s see! In the past 2.5 months I have gotten really sick, all intestinal related. The first time my stomach did such funny things that kept me close to a bathroom for 4 days that I finally admitted my fate and inhaled 4 large horse pills to kill of the amebas that decided my belly was perfect for them.

Fine, everyone gets sick when they first move to a new place!

During this time, I started exercising with my trainer, and since I’m no stranger to workouts, I could do a good amount. So after about one week of building up my resistance we did a great workout. The following day I was in bed, with a huge fever sick to my stomach and nothing else.  The weird intestinal infection that had no explanation at all lasted for 3 days and the only way my stomach stopped screaming at me was for me to take antibiotics. I hate medicine!!!

Now I was getting a bit concerned.  I’m not eating out in restaurants (even though I totally trust most of them), I never eat at the food stands (I’ve had way too many bad experiences in my life and stay away from them). I clean my fruits and veggies with a special spray called Veggie wash, but do still wash them in the water.  Maybe that’s the problem?

After recovering, I became even more careful with what I eat (if that’s possible) and have resumed my exercise program. Once again, I have to start from the beginning because getting sick zaps you of all your energy and you have to build it up.

Right as I’m back on schedule, my body is feeling great and strong, my trainer says let’s do the hill. It’s a pretty strong route where we head straight up for a few kilometers almost to the cross overlooking Antigua. After doing it, I felt fantastic. My legs worked hard and then we came home and did abs and legs and chest! All throughout the session I was thinking that I need to start doing this 4 times a week, that’s how much I miss working out. 

That full day I felt so good and alive and healthy. I even did the numbers how much it would cost if I hired the guy for one extra day per week. I must have spent a good hour or so mulling it over in my mind and playing with the numbers, prepared to tell him the next day let’s go for it.

That night everything was the same. I ate a light dinner with my family, went to bed at a normal hour and slept really well.  The next morning when I awoke my chest felt like someone stepped on it. I felt kind of sick, although the pain was unbearable. But not permitting myself to believe that I was sick – AGAIN. I didn’t cancel my training session, but decided to stick close to home, just in case.

By the time he arrived, my energy level was down so much that after 20 minutes of super mild exercise I told him goodbye and barely made it to bed. Then I got nausea. I never get nausea, it’s just something that I don’t get! So I called my husband, and he’s like you’re pregnant. I’m like, I wish, but this didn’t feel like a pregnancy to me.  A few minutes later, I’m in the bathroom vomiting up green and red. Since I didn’t eat anything this morning, I literally had nothing to vomit.  I was left drenched in a cold sweat and had to lay on the bathroom floor to come back to life.

Once again, barely making it back to my bed, I called my husband and said, “get home, there is no way I can pick up our son from school. And help me!!!”

He cut out of work early. But during that hour I think I came pretty close to death, because I had to vomit another 5 times, and burned the inside of my esophagus and throat so bad I couldn’t talk for the rest of the day. I didn’t even have enough energy to open my eyes when he finally came home to give me special medicine to stop the vomiting reflex which he practically pushed down my throat and watched my body heave up and down, until it kicked in and I was able to pass out into some sort of oblivion for the rest of the day.

I have absolutely no explanation at all as to what happened, besides the fact that it was an obvious intoxication. And if I didn’t feel any better the following day, I would have definitely have gone to the hospital.

Yet, both my husband and trainer keep repeating to me, “when you exercise your defenses go down and you can sick.” This song can be sung to a person who barely works out and would probably gladly jump on this as an excuse NOT to continue, but it doesn’t fly with me, or at least it didn’t!

Can it really be related? Can my exercising really bring my defenses down so that any odd contaminate that seems to live in every piece of food I eat come out and attack me?

Since that day, I have fully resumed my exercising but am forced to really cut back on pushing myself in fear that I will get super sick again! To me this isn’t a healthy way to live!

Bio

Marina has been living in Central America for over 7 years and her site Travel Experta is all about traveling in Central America. Marina loves to help people plan the perfect vacation to this amazing part of the world! You can sign up for her RSS feed and join the fun on her facebook fan page and follow her on Twitter at @MarinaVillatoro.