My favourite posts from the first year!

Since it was Melissa Loses It’s first birthday yesterday I thought I would put together a post with my favourite posts from my first year. This was really hard and at first I was going to do my top 10 favourites but I couldn’t narrow it down to 10 so I’ve gone with my faveourite 12 which I figure is one for each month (although it’s not one from each month if you know what I mean.) I have ordered them in the order they were posted originally because to have to rank them would be too hard! Here goes!

First up is the post I did called The Hardest Breakup. I really like this post because I think many people who have been through bariatric surgery can relate to this post and it’s a great thing to consider doing in terms of getting ahead mentally before bariatric surgery. This is a must read if you have an upcoming surgery.

Reading Food Labels is still one of my favourites because I know it has been helpful to lots of people. Learning to read food labels and being able to interpret them properly is so important after bariatric surgery so you can make sure the things you’re eating are appropriate for you and your new way of eating. I still read the labels of everything I eat that has one and if it doesn’t stack up how I want it to then I won’t eat it.

Last year I appeared in the first ever episode of Kiwi Living and I had a makeover with Luke Bettesworth. Part of the promotion for the show that I got to do was a photoshoot and interview for Woman’s Day magazine. I never thought I would end up in a magazine so I’m still stoked with this now even months later. I did this post just clarifying some of the things that weren’t quite right in the article. On my About Me page theres an image of the whole article and pictures.

One of the things that still irritates me to this day is when people assume I am SO much happier now that I have lost my excess weight. I did this post on happiness after my gastric bypass surgery. Basically yes I’m happy I sorted my weight and don’t have obesity related health issues to worry about but am I insanely happy every day now, not quite.

I think my 10 Post-op Golden Rules post is one of the most practical and useful ones I’ve ever written. There are guidelines that pretty much every gastric bypass patient are given after surgery to help ensure your ongoing success and this post sums them up nicely. I still revisit it every now and then to give myself a reminder about what I should be doing day in and day out with my teeny tiny tummy.

My What I think of my body 18 months out post was a really good reflective point for me. While your body changes so rapidly throughout the rapid weight loss phase it usually takes our minds quite a bit longer to notice and percieve the changes that have happened to you body. Also I share my thoughs about why I think it’s not a good idea to have too much of an idea of how you want your body to look afterwards.

One of my favourite posts ever was the letter to my pre-op gastric bypass self I wrote. I really enjoyed writing it and I hope it speaks to people who are in the early stages of their bariatric journey. The comments readers left on this post were beautiful and really made me realise how much I would have appreciated something like this before surgery, hindsight is a great thing isn’t it!

The post I have been most scared to put up has to be the one about how my skin is after gastric bypass surgery. Losing more than half your body weight is not the most ideal thing to put your skin through and it’s the burning question people really want to ask but are often too shy to ask because they think it’s too private. Well privacy no more because there’s photos of my saggy tummy on the internet forever.

I am a pretty calm and even tempered person and it takes a lot to make me angry and ranty. I wrote Why we need to start openly talking about bariatric surgery ourselves and in the media after a whole lot of things combined and made me mad, really mad. I am not in the slightest bit ashamed of my gastric bypass and we still have so far to go with how obesity and weight loss are talked about in the mainstream media. I still get frustrated on a frequent basis by the way these things are talked about because it reinforces harmful stereotypes that we really need to move away from.

One thing I will always have left over from my surgery are my scars. I quite like my scars they help tell the story my body has been through. I posted pictures of my scars and a little write up about what it was like having my surgery done laparoscopically. One of them has healed so well I struggled to find it to take a picture of it for this post.

I really think this next post is going to be one of my all time favourites ever!! It was my husband and I’s fifth wedding anniversary in December last year and for shits and giggles I thought it might be fun to see if we could both fit in my wedding dress now. It turns out we could and you can see the photographic evidence of that here.

I really appreciate that obesity and morbid obesity are starting to be studied more and more and that researchers are finding out so many interesting things about something that has and is often still thought of as a pretty simple health issue. I read a random article on Buzzfeed of all places about contestants from The Biggest Loser and it led me down a really intresting path of research and discovery. You can check out that post here. I think keeping an eye out for and writing about new reserch that comes out is something I’m going to start doing more often here.

Was your favourite post of mine from Melissa Loses It’s first year in this list? Tell me which one was your favourite and if you have any ideas or suggestions on what you would like me to cover more of on Melissa Loses It comment below and I’ll see what I can do. Thank you again for visiting my blog it means more to me than you know!!