Since much knowledge is contained in LJ....

[redbird]

Two questions I could use help with. The first is, does anyone know the approximate weight, or mass, of the human gall bladder? (My google-fu is not especially strong right now, and "weight gall bladder" gets weight-loss hits, while "mass gall bladder" gets articles on cancer.) This is not remotely necessary, but it might be handy for the next time some random asks if I've lost weight.

Second, I don't have a lot of appetite. Granted, illness is one of the reasons the body stores fat, but I'd rather not be living on stored fat, tea, orange juice, lowfat milk, water, and multivitamins. So, I'm open to suggestions for tempting low-fat things. That includes not-too-difficult things cattitude can make for dinner, or anything that I can just take out of a package or the refrigerator or freezer. N.B.: Low-fat specifically, for the period while I'm recovering from this surgery. Total calories aren't an issue, except in the sense that if I look at a can of soup and think "well, I could wash out a pot, and make some of this, and the amount I'm likely to be interested in has sixty calories," I may not want to bother. Fiber is good, protein is good, keeping hydrated is good. Cooked greens are icky, and Cattitude is allergic to mushrooms. We do not have a microwave oven. ETA: I also don't like soy milk in most contexts, certainly not for drinking by itself. (When a little is used in cooking, I can accept it, though I'd rather have cow's milk. When I visit adrian_turtle, she gets me cow's milk. When she visits here, we get her soy milk.)

Comments

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

Instant Indian food? Or if you have a rice cooker, throw in some rice, split mung beans and spices and make kichari? And how about good Chinese takeout?

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Low-fat Chinese food exists?

When I had an evil gall bladder, I had Chinese a few times - always, dishes that appeared to be cooked in minimal amounts of fat. And every time I was severely ill afterwards. Similarly, I still can't handle a lot of Indian food because it tends to be swimming in grease. (The food is too greasy for someone with gall bladder issues even when I go to the "healthy eating" Indian that state they cook with minimal fat. I can eat it now but couldn't while my gallstones were active.) And a person needs to be very careful when they have an evil gall bladder/soon after the evil gall bladder is removed, because your ability to handle hot spices disappears. I don't generally like chilli or spices hotter than black pepper, but things that I'd consider tasty rather than too hot would give me unbelievable intestinal pain.

I like the rice, beans and spices option though :)

[timill]

This help?

[redbird]

This being the US, if asked if I've lost weight, I can say "well, only a quarter pound, but they took it out laparoscopically."

Then again, if anyone comments favorably on my current appearance relative to what it was a month or year ago, they aren't paying attention. Or are confusing me with someone else, like the person on the anesthesia team Monday who asked if I'd been there before, because I looked familiar.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

The gallbladder is only around 8cm long. You could probably estimate the mass from that.
Here is a series of pictures of a removal operation (http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/2839/pictour.html).

Happy recovering!

[sraun]

For the weight of the gall bladder - it's got to be on the order of ounces.

For food - what about granola or dry cereal? You need to check the ingredients list, but either can be had with very little fat, and I like using either of them as a dry snack food. Doesn't help much with the hydration.

Oh - what about soy milk? I don't know if it has problems similar to real milk when it comes to breathing, but I know people who like it on their cereal.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

I would also say indian food -- rice and a simple curry -- even one made with packaged sauce might be edible! You might want to avoid dal -- depending on what your doc said. When I had my appendix out, the doctor told me to stay off the legumes for about a week, as they tend to create those pleasant gases that are not so good for recent abdominal surgery.

Perhaps a simple dish of pasta tossed with steamed veg?

[thette.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember weights of around 50 gram for the gall bladders sent to the pathologists, but I'm not certain.

[redbird]

Ah. I'm finding 50 cc for the volume of bile one of these things can store, and looked at a picture and did some fast and approximate math in my head, then picked a convenient unit that will be familiar to Americans to get the comment to timill above. But 50 grams for the gall bladder itself is likely more precise, as well as significantly smaller.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Rice pudding & Sweetcorn soup (http://baratron.livejournal.com/382930.html). The rice pudding can be made with skimmed cow milk rather than soy, or semi-skimmed if you can tolerate that (can't remember what the US calls it - 2%?). Quantities work with any kind of rice. Note that you don't need to dirty a measuring jug, just leave the bowl on the scales and pour in the milk. 600 ml of milk is about equivalent to 600 g of rice. I'd also guess that you can do the recipe using any measuring units you like, as long as you get the 6:1 ratio correct (which with ounces requires actual MATHS).

If you can't face making soup from scratch, many tinned soups are low fat. I'd personally go with the Baxter's healthy eating range (most soups are in the 1-2% range), but it's a British company. There's an American brand called Amy's who make tasty low-fat soups - I think most are vegetarian but not all. What you can do to bulk out soup is eat it with plain bread (French bread is almost never made with oil or butter), or cook a normal sized serving pasta or rice and toss it into the soup.

Pasta with low-fat tomato sauce is also easy. If you can't find a low-fat premade sauce, then you can use a tin of chopped tomatoes with herbs (basil, oregano) and black pepper, and a minimal sprinkling of olive oil. More exciting variant of this (http://baratron.livejournal.com/404245.html).

Hot fudge brownies (http://baratron.livejournal.com/324206.html). Yummy. Made with semi-skimmed/2% milk, 2.77g per brownie if cut into 8 or 1.85g per brownie if cut into 12. Made with skimmed milk (~0.2% fat), 2.28g per brownie if cut into 8, or 1.52g if cut into 12. I also have a recipe for vegan gingerbread/ginger cake that is delicious and less than 0.2g of fat per slice, though I don't remember if I typed it up anywhere. I ate it a lot for breakfast, as ginger is soothing to the digestive system.

Have a look at my recipe list (http://baratron.livejournal.com/356534.html) and tell me if you want any of them typed up. Getting round to this off my own back doesn't happen, but I can do it if someone specifically requests. (The main barrier to typing them up is that I tend to do some measurements by eye rather than with numbers, and I always try to make my recipes totally kitchen novice/idiot-proof. If I'm typing them for someone who knows how to cook, I don't have to worry about that, just ingredients and times.)

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Chicken soup is traditional convalescent food for a reason. You can put extra meat in it. Do you still have some in the freezer? You can get plain roast chicken or turkey from the supermarket, if you're not up to cooking it yourself. Or you can heat your leftover broth, or even canned broth (to which you would probably want to add lemon juice, powdered ginger, and perhaps dried onion flakes), and make egg drop soup. It's good with rye bread. Or you could put rice or noodles in it.

Most baked chicken dishes are quite low in fat if you take the skin off the chicken. Baking in a sauce keeps the chicken from drying out. (I've always thought of poultry skin as an inconvenient thing food comes wrapped in, like feathers, rather than being food of itself.)

The brownies I usually make will give you calories, though not much protein or fiber. You can reduce the fat by replacing the margarine with 1/2 cup of mashed banana, and reducing the sugar to 1.5 cups. (It's possible to omit the vegetable oil but that's bad for the texture.) The banana flavor is not very strong, and goes nicely with the chocolate. I usually use vanilla rather than orange, though.

Wicked easy fudge brownies
1 cup King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
2 cups sugar
3/4 cup natural or Dutch-process cocoa OR 1/2 cup black cocoa + 1/4 cup natural or Dutch-process cocoa
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
3 large eggs
1 stick butter or margarine, melted
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Put all of the ingredients into a large bowl in the order in which they're written. Stir, then beat the mixture till smooth.
Spoon the batter into a lightly greased 9 x 13-inch pan. Bake the brownies in a preheated 375°F oven for 25 to 30 minutes, or until they're just barely beginning to pull away from the sides of the pan. Let them cool completely before cutting. Yield: about 2 dozen brownies.

[fuzzygabby.livejournal.com]

When I was really sick I sometimes ate little cups of applesauce. Also chocolate pudding, though I don't know how lowfat that was.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Chocolate pudding is nutritionally very similar to milk with chocolate syrup, gelatin, and/or cornstarch. Most of the commercial versions these days are lowfat or nonfat.

[janetmk.livejournal.com]

I hope your appetite picks up as you recover. What I'd probably eat is a scrambled egg and whole-grain toast.

[kate_nepveu]

I am rotten at thinking of low-fat things, but if you're looking for fiber and don't already know this, the fiber supplements you sprinkle over stuff really don't taste like anything, at least not over my morning toast and yogurt. (I use FiberSure, which is in a blue container.)

[kate_nepveu]

(Duh--someone interrupted me--feel better soon.)

[shikzoid.livejournal.com]

When I was having trouble with PCOS I think I lived on yogurt for half a year. I took your advice and got plain yogurt and put my own fruit in it. I usually used frozen strawberries or raspberries so I could get the fiber from the seeds.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

According to WikiAnswers, The bile in the gall blader weighs 40-70 ml (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_a_gall_bladder_weigh), which is interesting since the ml is a measure of volume, rather than weight. I guess your ballpark answer there would be something in the order of 40 - 70g, or 2 - 3 ounces.