Did losing four stone in eight months actually give me the gallstones? Nobody warned me dieting could do this

Something I have never quite got an answer to and it still niggles nearly a year after my operation, so I am asking the collective.

The year before my gallbladder went bad I lost about four stone. Properly strict, meal replacements for a big chunk of it, barely any fat, skipped breakfast most days, the lot. I felt brilliant. Then the attacks started, scan, gallstones, out it came.

My daughter has just started something similar and when I mentioned it she looked at me like I had two heads. Is this an actual thing or have I invented a link because the timing was neat? Because if it IS a thing I am fairly cross that not one person mentioned it at any point, not the diet plan, not my GP, nobody. I would still have lost the weight. I would just have liked to know.

Not invented. I heard the same from the nurse at my pre-op, that dropping weight fast is one of the things that gets bile forming stones. Mine was the opposite way round, I gained rather than lost, but the topic definitely came up.

This is uncomfortably close to home. I cut hard for a marathon block two years back, lost a fair bit of weight quickly, and about a year later I was in clinic being told I had a gallbladder full of stones. I had put it down to bad luck and genes. Reading this I am now wondering.

Slightly grim consolation for you: I promise nobody warned me either.

It is a real link, and you are far from the first person to arrive here cross about not being told.

I cannot claim it as my own story, mine were the boring slow kind that assembled over years while I ate perfectly normally, and I mistook the first attacks for indigestion for a fortnight. But it came up constantly once I started writing about this. The pattern people describe is exactly yours: a strict regime, a big loss, feeling better than they had in years, then the pain after a meal.

The two halves of it, as I understand them from the sources we work from, are that losing fat quickly means the liver pushes extra cholesterol into the bile, and that a gallbladder which is rarely asked to empty, because there is little fat arriving and meals are being skipped, lets that bile sit and concentrate. Both together are the stone-forming combination. Very low calorie regimes, long fasts and weight loss surgery all sit on the same risk list for that reason. The usual advice for lowering the odds is a gradual loss, roughly 1 to 2 pounds a week, and not skipping meals entirely, which is written up in weight loss and gallstones.

The bit I would gently push back on is the guilt I can hear underneath the question. Being at a healthy weight is protective for a great deal, gallstones included, and a huge number of people lose weight fast and never form one. What you did was raise a risk that most people are never told about, which is a failure of the telling rather than of you. Your daughter losing weight sensibly, eating regularly, is a different proposition from a crash.

The skipped breakfast detail is the one that surprises me most every time it comes up. You would swear that the less you make the thing work the happier it would be.

Thank you, that is the clearest explanation I have had, and honestly better than the shrug I got at my follow up.

I have passed the gradual bit on to my daughter without going full doom about it. And I have made a small peace with mine. Slightly annoyed to learn the missed breakfasts were doing me no favours at all, mind.

Late thought that has been rattling round since I read this. Cutting weight for sport gets talked about endlessly in running forums and I have never once seen a gallbladder mentioned in any of it. Might be worth someone saying it out loud over there.