'I was destroyed both physically and emotionally'
A plus-size influencer says that she traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, to get gastric band surgery for weight loss when she was 14 years old.
In a TikTok posted on April 3 by Kendra Austin (@kendramorous), she says that after watching Oprah interview a 14-year-old who had gotten weight loss surgeries, she chose to get laparoscopic gastric banding, also known as lap band surgery. The surgery involves a silicone band placed around the stomach to lessen its capacity and slow down food digestion.
"I looked to my mom and I said, 'This is what's gonna save me," Austin says in her TikTok about the experience of seeing the Oprah interview. "And when I said 'save me' at the time, it was, 'Save me from the rejection and lack of belonging that came with being in a fat, Black body as a child.'"
Of the surgery itself, Austin says she lost approximately 80 pounds before she entered high school—all of which she says she regained over time.
"Which comes with, again, not having worked on the fact that my body was not the problem," Austin says. "The external world and its perception of me and what I was deserving of in this body was the problem."
She says she spent years "yo-yo dieting," or losing and gaining weight over and over again, but now is at a weight that she "probably started all of [her] weight loss journeys at" and is happier than she could have "ever imagined."
"In pursuit of becoming thin, I had robbed myself of all the experiences that I thought I would have only if I was thin," Austin says in her TikTok, which had over 175,000 views on Wednesday.
She says she still struggles with eating and has acid reflux and that the lap band is still around her stomach and costly to remove.
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