Does your gallbladder hurt?

Inspiration from a fave show, fabulous fibre, and a bit on gallbladders going rogue.

Photo by Ellicia on Unsplash

I am bloody delighted to see that TVNZ on demand is now showing The Bold Type season 5. It has been out for ages on the US streamers, like a year at least, but nothing for us wee fans out here in NZ. If you don’t know what I’m on about, go to TVNZ on demand, find The Bold Type season 1, and follow your nose.

It’s an excellent, easy-watch show and season 5 is wonderful. But a thing one of the characters, Sutton, says as she dramatically exits a scene:

“I can only control what’s in my control”.

And it got me thinking about all the mud we sling at ourselves all day over things we can’t control.

Isn’t it madness?

We tend to obsess a little over things we cannot control, like:

How others treat us.
A scale number.
Our physical needs like sleep, or hunger.
Cellulite.. YES! This is completely out of your control so you can stop being mean to your connective tissue - and no, a cream, a potion, or a lotion, will not make cellulite go away.

All of these things and a list as long as my arm of other things that we stress about or are unkind to ourselves about that are wholly out of our control in the first place.

So what’s the takeaway here?

Think about the things that are up in your grill right now, and if they are squarely out of your realm of control, let ‘em go.

What’s one thing you’re going to no longer give a shit about?

Comment or email me - I really want to know.

Moving on - shall we talk about fibre now?

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Fibre.

My unqualified reckons is that most of us don’t actually know what fibre does. We probably know that it helps keeps things moving, but aside from that, like crickets, am I right?

The main thing to know, is not all fibre is the same. So here is my quick fire list about fibre so you too can have weird facts tucked away for such a time you need to yank them out such as the daily or pub quiz. Or when you reach a certain age, these things - believe it or not, often come up in casual conversation.

Anyway, the list. Here it is.

• All fibre comes from plants. No where else. So you gotta eat the veggies and grains to get it. Or take a supplement, but that fibre supplement is also from plants - y’know, whatever works.

• There’s two types of fibre

  • Soluble fibre dissolves in water and works to help lower glucose and blood cholesterol. It kinda turns into like a goopy substance and acts a bit like a sponge where it absorbs excess water from the body. This in turn helps to soften stools. (Once upon a time, it would be so embarrassing to discuss this stuff, but times have changed and poop chat is too important to ignore.)

  • Insoluble fibre does not dissolve in water, does not digest, but adds bulk to stools to make them easier to pass.

• Soluble fibre foods include

  • oats

  • chia seeds

  • Legumes – dried peas, beans, lentils

  • Vegetables – broccoli, brussels sprouts, carrots, potato, kumara

  • Fruit – apples, pears, citrus, stone fruit, and berries

• Insoluble fibre foods include

  • Bread – grainy, wholemeal, other brown bread types

  • Wholegrain cereals

  • Wholewheat pasta

  • Brown rice (white rice too, I guess)

  • Corn, polenta

  • Fruit & Vegetables (different ones)

• The recommended amount of daily fibre intake is around 25-30 grams.

  • That can be quite hard to achieve, especially if you have food challenges. And so my unqualified reckons - I seem to have a lot of them these days, is to first see if your daily fibre intake is a problem. If it is not a problem, you’re just gonna go ahead and live your very best life and not even worry about any of this.

  • If it is a problem and your guts are a mess, then you probably wanna go get it sorted. A registered dietitian (you know ya girl loves properly qualified people where health matters are concerned!) can help. It’s highly likely a dietitian will ask for a food diary of some sort so they can see what your fibre intake is like as standard, and from there they will work out how to make changes or offer supplements to get your fibre up. Don’t listen to cowboys on this one! Someone spurting numbers at you like in the above point, with no further advice, is not the right person to give advice on food.

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Does your gallbladder hurt?

Queen of random, I am - probably don’t ever expect a tidy theme in these emails - but when cis women get to around 40 - when they still have a bit of fertility left, a new pain enters the chat.

It was the lower back pain in our thirties, and in our forties, for some people, a sharp and severe stabbing pain in the upper right side of the stomach is the new kid on the block.

Is this you? Does it happen after eating something delicious?

Obviously I’m not a doctor or similar medical professional, but if you are regularly getting this pain and are in the fair, fertile, and forties category, don’t let it get any worse. You don’t have to put up with this pain, or endure it when it’s really bad.

This was me.

Pain in my right side that took my breath away.

Nearly always at night, just when I was trying to sleep.

So I went to my GP who scooted me off to get a scan where the scan people did their thing and counted a bunch of rocks just hanging out in my gallbladder, probably having a nice time. Also a fair bit of sludge just sitting there.

The scan man was very nice and said completely off the record, that the rocks weren’t going to shift themselves, and the sludge, if left for a very long time, could creep up to my pancreas, block it all up, and then I’d really know the definition of pain and being incredible unwell.

After seeing a family member go through pancreatitis, I took scan man’s words seriously, and due to the stack of privilege of having health insurance, got the damned thing out.

Holy toast, it was the best surgery I have ever had.

Not gonna lie, it took me about 4 weeks to recover fully from the surgery. At least 2 weeks just for the anaesthetic to drain from my body. But with the healing time tacked on, I reckon I was back and fighting fit after two months.

That sounds like a long time, but it’s really not.

Not when you’re experiencing the debilitating pain of an unhappy gallbladder.

There are of course some changes you might need to make, or side effects you might have due to no longer having a bile storage facility, but it is still a mile better than keeping an organ that isn’t really working properly anyway.

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Thanks for reading this newsletter. I really appreciate the time you give to me for this and I hope you get some value from it. If you have any questions you can reply directly to this email or if you’ve landed here from a link, email lou@sweatypals.nz. You can also follow me on Twitter here, and instagram here.

Please remember nutrition is an interest of mine, I am not a registered dietitian or nutritionist, and information shared here is through my own lived experience, personal study or a peer reviewed study I have nerded out on reading and sharing with you.

Lou xx