Five weeks without my gallbladder and greasy food sends me straight to the loo. Is the diarrhoea permanent, and do I need a low-fat diet forever now?

Five weeks post keyhole and mostly I feel great, back to easy running, cuts healed, no complaints there. The problem is the OTHER end. Most food is fine but the second I have anything properly greasy, a fry up, a takeaway, a big lump of cheese, I'm making an undignified dash to the bathroom an hour or two later and it is not pleasant. Loose is putting it politely.

I've half convinced myself I've broken my digestion permanently and I'm going to be on a sad boiled-chicken diet for the rest of my life, which for someone who trains and eats a lot is a genuinely depressing thought. Is this a thing that settles or is this just my life now. And do I actually need to be eating low fat forever or am I supposed to be pushing the fatty stuff back in. Nobody at the hospital said a word about food, they basically waved me out the door.

Oh I remember this stage so well and I promise you it is not your life now. Mine did exactly the same for the first couple of months, greasy food went straight through me and I mourned cheese. It faded slowly and honestly I can't remember the last time I thought about it, I eat completely normally now, cheese and all. Give it time, it really does calm down.

No such thing as a permanent gallbladder diet, put that idea down. You reintroduce the fatty stuff gradually rather than all at once in a heap, that's all. Nobody tells you because it sorts itself out for most people before anyone gets round to it.

Runner, this is one of the questions that made me build the site, because I had exactly your panic at about the same point and could not get a straight answer. So here is the plain version, from a year on the other side of my own operation and checked against what the surgeon signs off.

Nothing is broken. Your liver still makes bile, it always did; the gallbladder was only the storage cupboard that released a concentrated squirt when a fatty meal arrived. Without it the bile just drips steadily into the intestine instead of arriving in a timed dose, and for a while a big greasy meal can outpace that steady drip and hurry things through, which is the dash you're describing. Most people notice no lasting difference and go back to a completely normal diet. A minority, commonly put somewhere around 5 to 20 out of 100, get the looser, more frequent stools you've got, and for most of them it eases over weeks to a few months rather than being forever. The site's piece on diarrhoea after gallbladder removal goes into why, and life without a gallbladder covers how digestion resettles overall.

What I did, and what tends to help, is exactly what's said above: reintroduce fatty foods gradually rather than testing the system with a whole takeaway at once, and keep going, because avoiding all fat forever isn't the goal and isn't necessary. The one caveat I'll add is the honest one: if it's genuinely not easing after several months and it's ruling your life, that's worth a GP visit, because there are simple treatments that bind up the extra bile and it shouldn't just be endured. Whether that's you is a conversation for your own GP who can look at the whole picture, not something I can call from here.

Following because I'm booked in soon and this is one of my quiet dreads. Can I ask the awkward version of the question: for the people it sticks with past a few months, does it ever fully go, or do some just live with it?

For most of us it genuinely fades to nothing, that's the honest average. The small number it lingers for is exactly where the GP chat and the bile-binding treatment come in, so it isn't a case of just gritting your teeth forever even then. Don't let it put you off, it was a footnote in my recovery, not the story.

Update three weeks on and it's already noticeably better. I stopped treating my first fatty meal back like a dare and started easing things in, and the dramatic dashes have dropped right off. Had a proper burger at the weekend and lived to tell it. Massive relief to hear this is the normal middle bit and not my permanent new normal, thank you all.