Saviera Davids (24) has had to overcome many challenges to get to where she is now. When she shared her story about her experience with gastric bypass on Instagram, she noticed that this way she could inspire other people. “I received a lot of positive reactions from people, also with a healthy body. They were also interested in my story.”
“I decided to share my story on social media. There I found out that there is still a big taboo around a stomach reduction. The closer I got to my goal weight, the more ugly comments started coming in. Luckily I was already so deep in my own journeythat it no longer touched me. During the time of my overweight, I also built up a thick skin for negativity.”
“I hope with my story to make it clear that there is a story behind every body. With my story I want to bring out other stories, so that I can also mean something to someone else who might be going through the same thing. Because being healthy and losing weight It’s really not just a physical thing, mentally it might be even harder.”
‘I do not need a man’
“As long as I can remember I had problems with my weight. It has always been a way for me to protect myself from the outside world. I was raped when I was fourteen. Then I protected myself by eating more, because I noticed that men didn’t look so quickly at a fuller woman, it gave me back my confidence, I thought: I’m a full woman now and I don’t need a man anymore. But in the meantime I was not aware that I trauma was just pushing away.”
“I was the first in my family to be overweight. There were some other fuller ladies, but not like me. It wasn’t always easy within the family either. I grew up around domestic violence. I was the oldest of the four children, so I had the feeling that I had to take care of the others. So I did. During that period, eating was the only moment of rest for me. My grandmother saw that and saw me become fuller. She tried me I could help then, but she did that so directly and unkindly that I didn’t want to listen to it. ‘Just let me eat, Grandma’, I thought then. It’s hard enough.”
“Hey Toet, you can do it!”
“Until my grandmother got lung cancer. On her deathbed she told me: ‘Hey Toet, if I die, please try to lose weight. You can do it and it will make you happier.’ Then I saw that she meant really well, and I was also willing to listen. She also suggested doing it through a stomach reduction. On July 2, 2020, my grandmother died and on December 9 I had surgery.”
“The first few months I was not yet aware of the mental effects of losing weight. At that time I was mainly busy buying new clothes and trying to find my way. Around the summer I weighed around eighty kilos, and then the attention of men. During the same period I followed a meditation process with Credible Messengers, a network within Amsterdam that offers young people equal opportunities from the network of a credible messenger (Credible Messenger). When meditating, everything came out at once. I went completely into a trance and started crying so hard. I found that I had not yet processed the experiences of my childhood at all. That really made the mental part of losing weight harder for me than the physical part.”
In the program warriors inspiring North Hollanders tell their story.
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