For the past ten days I've been trying to cut as much fat - especially dairy and saturated fats - out of my diet as possible, in order to calm my grumbling gall bladder. So far, so good, and I've not really noticed a great deal of difference in my food, but have noticed a huge improvement in how I've been feeling. I do still have a scraping of butter on my toast in the mornings - probably a tenth of what I used to have, and yesterday, for the first time, I had the merest touch of grated parmesan in a salad wrap for my lunch. Mashed potato has been made with semi-skimmed milk instead of with butter and milk or cream - if I had any in the fridge (hang my head in shame - no wonder my gall bladder was annoyed!) And you know what, I couldn't really taste the difference at all.
Chocolate has been left well alone (have you seen how much saturated fat is in it? - what an eye opener!) but I have discovered that there are all sorts of sweet things that are fat-free instead - jelly babies, marshmallows, crystallised fruit or ginger, and even liquorice allsorts are pretty low in saturated fats, so I don't feel deprived at all. 'Bought' desserts like cheesecake or trifle have gone by the board in favour of stewed fruit, fresh fruit or fat-free (and aspartame-free) yogurt. I've found that the low-fat Rachel's organic vanilla yogurt makes a wonderful substitute for cream on stewed fruit. Bananas have become a big hit with me too as they are ideal to eat as a snack and full of energy - and are easy to buy organically as even Aldi have organic bananas (and, I was delighted to find, aspartame-free fat-free yogurts.)
This lunchtime was a bit of a test as P took me out for a pub lunch. I was somewhat limited to what I could choose on the menu but ended up with a salmon fishcake with sweet chilli sauce as a starter and a warm duck salad with hoi-sin dressing for a main. The pudding list totally defeated me and I thought £4.80 for a fruit salad, when I wasn't going to have either the cream or ice cream with it, was a bit much so I settled for a coffee, although had to send the cream back and ask for milk instead. It was a lovely meal and should be gall-bladder friendly!!
A couple of very useful Low-Fat Cookbooks were found in the junk shop yesterday and there seem to be some interesting new dishes I can try from the recipes next week. Yup, ten days in - and a lifetime to go - and it's all working out quite well and I am so relieved to be free of that awful pain in my ribs that I don't even what to think about eating a lot of fatty foods ever again.