My New Life Living With Gallstones

I recently lost 30 pounds in seven weeks, all without trying. After several ER visits and all sorts of tests, it turns out I have gallstones. This is a story about my new life, and new diet, living with gallstones.

Over the last seven weeks I've managed to lose 30 pounds of body weight -- all unintentionally. I became very sick with a "mystery" stomach ailment, had several trips to the ER, many tests, and met several new doctors, including a new GP and gastroenterologist. In short, most of my problems now seem to be directly related to me having gallstones.

If you happen to have gallstones you already know the story: Bile is made in the liver, and the gallbladder is responsible for storing this bile, which is used later during the digestive process. If you have something wrong with your body chemistry, or something in your DNA, you can easily develop gallstones, and gallstones can create an enormous amount of pain when something finally goes wrong.

Rather than write any more about the biology of gallstones, I'd like to skip all that, and share what I've learned over the last few weeks about living with gallstones once you have them, and you don't want surgery.

Foods I can't eat any more

The first thing you need to learn about are foods you can' eat when you have gallstones, or if you can eat them, you can't eat much of them, unless of course you happen to like pain. These "bad" foods include:

• Greasy and fatty foods
• Dairy products, especially rich products like cream
• Refined sugar
• Eggs (these are supposed to be very bad, but I don't eat them myself)
• Alcohol
• Gluten

A friend of mine is a nutritionist, and she's currently doing a lot of research about gluten, and she says gluten is just plain bad for people.

Foods I can eat with gallstones

The next thing to figure out if what foods you can eat when you have gallstones.

I've been reading a lot of material on the internet about gallstones, and talking to my new doctors (the GP and the gastroenterologist), and experimenting with my own diet. In short, this is a list of foods that I have been able to eat without and side effects (and when I say "side effects" I mean a lot of pain):

• Apples, apple juice, applesauce
• Grapes, grape juice
• Tofu, which is important for protein
• Most vegetables
• Avocados, which are a source of good fat
• Lots of water, preferable with lemon juice added
• Most soups that don't contain cream or fatty meats
• Coffee, in small amounts
• Very small quantities of cookies, preferably something like fig newtons

I've been able to get away with eating a few Oreo cookies at a time, and frankly, I'm fine with that. I've actually come to appreciate having gallstones, as they seem to work in a very similar manner to a very expensive Lap-Band surgery: if you eat too much, or too much of the wrong foods, you'll have pain, which serves as a terrific bio-feedback device.

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