my fascinating so-called diet

[baratron]

The purpose of the gall bladder is to store bile, a substance produced by the liver, which has two functions:
1) it neutralises acid produced by the stomach
2) it emulsifies fats, i.e. breaks them up into tiny droplets for digestive enzymes to work on

It is probably not surprising that with a fucked gall bladder, I have to eat a very low-fat diet. It may scare you just how boring my diet currently is:

All I can eat without pain is the following:
- corn flakes w/ soy milk
- rice krispies w/ soy milk
- toast with jam spread directly onto the bread, no butter replacement
- toast with a very thin layer of butter replacement & Marmite
- carrot & butterbean soup w/ homemade bread, no butter
- homemade sweetcorn soup w/ homemade bread
- jacket potato w/ baked beans, no butter
- miso soup (the vegetarian high-protein replacement for chicken soup for sick people :) ).
- edamame (steamed soy beans)
- Japanese sticky white rice
- rice cooked in a little vegetable stock
- pitta bread
- tinned peaches or pears
- dried apricots
- grapes
- jelly (jello), although all the vegetarian ready-made jellies now contain CORN SYRUP instead of sugar, so they are far far too sweet and have a bitter aftertaste. Lovely.

In theory I should also be able to eat pasta with tomato sauce, but I have thrown that up 3 times in the past couple of weeks, and now just the thought of it is nauseating!

Drinks are a bit more interesting - I seem to be ok with any fruit juice, including the Innocent smoothies (that have 5 portions of fruit crammed into one glass), herbal teas, and Cadbury's Drinking Chocolate w/ soya milk. I can't really complain about my list of drinks - that's the bulk of the excitement in my diet atm :)

I've calculated that I can eat about 5g of fat a day without pain, but it has to be spread over several meals. If very nauseous, I can eat a couple of ginger biscuits to ease my stomach, but they have 1.5g of fat each, so I have to be careful. I can eat 4 to 6 dark chocolate buttons a day - any more than that is pushing my luck.

It's excessively boring, but I don't really feel like going back into hospital - especially as they had trouble finding vegan food for me. I had to make a huge fuss, and constantly remind them of my need for low fat food. The standard was two meaty and one veggie option, and all of the veggie options were extremely cheesy & greasy. Even most of the meaty options were. I was pretty shocked at the hospital menu, actually, considering that we live in an ethnically diverse area with a lot of Asian people - it was almost impossible to find dairy-free food without making a huge fuss. I'd like to think that a hospital offered healthy food, but this didn't seem to be the case - apart from breakfast, everything was very high fat, and low everything else. It was like school dinner food (and I've eaten school dinners more recently than most of you) - salty, fatty, and disgusting.

I need to try to find some kind of vegetable protein that isn't also very high in fat. Tofu is very low fat, but boiled tofu has a gooey texture that nauseates me at the best of times - it's really only edible after it's been lightly fried. Most of the veggie fake sausages and mince are as high in fat as the meat versions. The only one I know of that isn't is Quorn, but I can't eat that anymore. Blah. Just eating lots of beans of various types - as well as the list above, I have some Tuscan bean soup to try as well.

Comments

[geminigirl]

Would quinoa work? I haven't looked at the nutritional information on it in a while, so I'm not sure about the fat content, but it's a good protein source.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

We got some quinoa pieces a few years ago, when it first came out in the UK - made a stir fry with it, and neither Richard nor I could eat it. I ate about 3 pieces, he ate 2. It just made us feel sick. And it left a funny taste all over the vegetables, so we couldn't even eat [i]them[/i].

Now, there are a lot of things I like now that I didn't like when I first tried them, but quinoa still looks disgusting (those little puffed-up balls all stuck together! ewww) so I'm a bit afraid to try it again. I just need them to bring out vegan Quorn, except the company seem a bit adverse to that.

[geminigirl]

I can't eat it either...it's a texture thing. It reminds me too much of tapioca, which I can't eat. (I also won't eat oatmeal of any sort, nor any hot cereal, cottage cheese, rice pudding and a whole assortment of other things because of the texture.) It's too bad it doesn't work for you.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I like rice pudding, but none of the other things you mention. And I haven't had rice pudding for years, owing to not being able to buy vegan rice pudding in tins, and being too lazy to cook it myself from scratch. I should really prod Alpro and tell them to start making rice pudding.

[bfo.livejournal.com]

can you eat sultanas, rasins etc.

If so and you tell me what soya milk you can have I'll make an attempt at getting the bits and making you some rice pudding.

The only issue is i add sugar to it to sweeten it, I also sometimes add either nutmeg or cinimon (sp?) will that be a problem?

[barakta]

Tomatos are very acid, kim threw up tomato soup when she had the gallstone (we didn't know she had a gallstone trapped at that point). She has tried to eat it a few times since she had her gallbladder out and it's just left her with IBS like symptoms - so she's dropped it from the kim-eatables list. The same with fish for some reason which is a pain cos it's one of the few foods she likes.

Kim didn't seem to be hugely affected by the fat content of food, for her it was as much the size of the meal and needing to eat little and often. She ate a lot of carbs while her gallbladder was flaring up, mostly in the form of white rice and white bread (two things she will eat).

We found carrying part-baked bread rolls with us when visiting people was useful as immediate kim friendly food which she could cook and eat within a few minutes. Yes they are bland, but were useful when she got pain from /not/ eating and then annoying blood pressure shenanigans. The ones you get from tesco and ASDA are both vegan friendly and can do as a quick "I need food now" thing.

As for hospital food, I was unimpressed. Even if it had been edible (not warmed for hours and minging) everything was 'contaminated' with something else. So plain white fish which kim might have eaten under duress was covered in manky cheese sauce which smelt like mouldy socks. It was as if they had to mix up everything so the few 'ediable' things were covered or mixed in with 'inedible' things. I think kim managed to eat one white roll the day she left hospital and got discharged home where she could find better food. It does help that kim wisely refused ALL food for most of her stay in hospital as she didn't know if she was having surgery/procedures or not (people didn't know when she WAS nil by mouth, they still offered her loads of food despite BIG sign!). She also didn't wanna throw up again, so stuck to oral and IV fluids.

I wish you all the best finding low fat foods. It may be worth joining a low-fat-food community and seeing if anyone has any ideas. I know a friend who's family became very inventive when his mum had severe gallbladder problems and I am sure there have been others.

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Good luck with this. It seems quite challenging.

And, BTW, I know you hate the idea of surgery, a lot. But is gallbladder removal in your plans? As someone who suffered with gallstones and kept putting off the surgery hoping that the next attack would never happen, and ended up getting to the point of deciding it must be done after the horrible stone really does get completely stuck in duct and jaundice begins, well, anyway, I will say, if it's not already been scheduled, please do it. Surgery may be scary and is certainly unpleasant, but afterward you'll never have to worry about getting another one of those really wretched I-think-I'm-dying gallbladder attacks. I'm glad I had the surgery.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I keep hoping they'll just remove the stones and leave the gall bladder intact - but right from the start, when they didn't even know how many stones there were, the only option offered was removal of the whole thing. It's not scheduled because the hospital and/or local health authority are crap - they said the wait would be 8-9 weeks for the first appointment, which if it's true completely screws up my plans to go to alt.polycon. So far I've only been out of hospital a few days, so I wouldn't expect to hear from them for a couple more weeks at the earliest.

Don't get me wrong, I think free healthcare is a wonderful thing. I just wish it was a bit more organised. The difference in the cleanliness of the ward from one day to the next was unbelievable, depending on which particular set of staff were in that day. The food thing is case in point - healthy, low fat pastas & rice dishes actually cost less money than greasy lumps-o-"meat" - but take more effort to prepare.

[okoshun.livejournal.com]

Removal was my only option - I don't (didn't) think it's possible to remove the stones like you can for kidneys.

I was originally placed on a 3-4 month waiting list, but was told by the specialist that if I check in to emergency that I'd be fast tracked. Since I couldn't do anything buy lie in bed, hope I didn't have to move and gobble down painkillers like they were candy when I eventually did drag myself in to to emerg. they had me come back the next day to have it removed.

A slight complication had me stay one night in the hospital (it's usually a day procedure) - my liver had become infected and wrapped itself around the gallbladder. I woke up jaundiced - I've never seen my skin quite so yellow.

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Over here standard medical opinion is that removal is the best option. You might be able to keep it at bay with diet (but I know for me that it really didn't seem to matter what I ate--sometimes it would be fine even when I ate lots of fat, and other times it would flare up when I'd only been eating supposedly innocuous things--so once it seemed that I really had no control over it, I decided surgery was a reasonable solution--I was already planning to contact my doctor to say "go ahead, schedule it" when I had my "stuck in duct" emergency). IIRC there is some kind of "crush 'em with sonar" thing but it seems that's not generally a good option because the stones just develop again. I gather that this might still be used with patients who are very bad surgery candidates (for health reasons).

I don't think there is any procedure for removing stones from the gallbladder (though if one gets stuck in the bile duct like one of mine did they can go in and take that one out).

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Edit: Over here standard medical opinion is that removal of the gallbladder is the best option.

[esbat.livejournal.com]

Possibly a useless suggestion from someone who doesn't even eat the stuff, but could you grill tofu? Maybe with some kind of low-fat marinade on it first.

If I had gall bladder problems I think I'd be very reluctant to let anyone remove it, despite what I know.

Yeah, hospital food. Utterly foul. I love vegetables and I eat tons of them but the hospital canteen has an amazing ability to make any variety of vegetable unappetising.

Glad to see you're recovering anyway.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

You can 'fry' tofu in a dry frying pan, which is practically the same as grilling. Works best if marinaded or if you add drops of soy sauce or water or liquid to the pan, just enough to stop it burning.

Recently Addenbrooke's and someother hospitals were criticised for having a Burger King inside. I felt that before criticising Burger King, you needed to know if the rest of the food in the hospital was any better!

[esbat.livejournal.com]

Everytime I walk past the hospital canteen, there is a constant smell of sausages, chips and vinegar. Much healthier than burger kind I'm sure! In private hospitals though the food is usually very good. Steamed fish, that sort of thing. I'm sure it's not much more expensive than the NHS crap.

[36.livejournal.com]

A couple of years ago there was a Jamie's School Dinners style documentary about Lloyd Grossman trying to make hospitals have good food, turns out most hospitals have atrocious food, made in factories by people who break all the food hygiene rules and then are reheated so badly in the hospitals that any residual nutritional value is lost (I may be combining the Grossman thing with an episode of Dispatches actually). Oh and everything was massively full of salt and fat and very little else.

[ailbhe]

From the "Young people these days don't know they're born" department: My sister can't eat any pulses, brassicas, soya or red meat. Or onions. Or fat. Or dairy. Or wheat. She had her gallbladder out when I was about 14.

From the "slightly more helpful" department: What about crystallised ginger for your stomach? It should be fat-free, but of course you won't be able to eat as much of it as you could biscuits normally.

[ludy]

proabaly a silly question - how are you with nuts? I find almonds are good as easyly digestable veggie protein but they may well be too oily for you/banned for some other reason