Sara and her husband, Stephen, love to travel. But by her mid-twenties, her size started to impede her pleasures. Eventually reaching a peak of 340 pounds, she began to find her joints throbbed after even moderate exertion.

“I really like being able to walk, and we love to travel. But we found because of my size, it was hard for us to travel and do anything comfortably. When we did travel, my husband had to push me around in a wheelchair. At the age of 26, I decided that was enough,” Sara said.

The Columbus, Ind., resident and administrative associate at Cummins had tried various diets and exercise without lasting success. Her health problems ballooned as the numbers on her scale rose. Beyond the constant joint pain, Sara was diagnosed with high blood pressure and was considered pre-diabetic.

Most disturbing as she began her new life as a married woman was the realization that just getting pregnant and bringing a healthy baby to full term would be challenging at her current size.

The couple learned getting pregnant would be very difficult, involving visits to fertility specialists and potentially high costs. Even if successful, it would be considered a high-risk pregnancy with multiple adverse health outcomes possible for the baby. Sara decided she didn’t want to give her child any harder time in starting life than she had to.

“It got to the point where I realized I needed to do something to change life for the better,” she said.

After talking with her primary care physician, the doctor recommended she consider bariatric surgery to help lose weight. Sara hadn’t known anyone who had such a procedure, but she sought out others who had for counsel. That gave her the assurance she needed to move forward, and her physician referred her to the Weight Loss Institute of Columbus Regional Health.

After the normal pre-screening process, Sara had the gastric sleeve bypass performed in April 2013. The procedure went smoothly, and the weight began to drop off her frame quickly — 30 pounds in the first month alone.

At first, she struggled a little bit with keeping herself hydrated and adjusting to the new eating regimen — “knowing when my body needed to eat and when it was full.” But by the sixth week she felt she had everything under control. From there, it was just a matter of continuing to watch the pounds disappear.

Today she weighs about 220 pounds. And though she has plans to lose more, that will have to wait for a while, as she will actually be gaining weight — Sara recently found out she is pregnant with her first child.

“At this point I’m more satisfied by milestones than with numbers,” she said. “In the long run I want to lose more weight, but my primary goal was to get pregnant.” Without the bariatric surgery, having children was something that remained on Sara and Stephen’s wish list. Now, they’re already discussing more bundles of joy.