Sara Young finds life-changing success after bariatric surgery at age 24

At just 24, Sara Young met with plenty of resistance from friends and family when she first said she wanted to get weight-loss surgery.

“My dad told me, ‘You don’t want to change your life. You’re young!’” But that, she said, was exactly the point. “I said ‘No, I do want to change my life. That’s why I’m doing it.’”

Choosing to pursue surgery despite concerns from her family, her partner and others marked a milestone for the Black Diamond woman that had nothing to do with her weight. “This is the first thing I did without the support of every person around me,” she says. “I’m usually a people pleaser.”

By the time of her surgery, they had come around and were fully supportive, Young says. But she admits that at first, even she wondered if she should wait. Her biggest concern was how it would change her interaction with friends. “Would I be able to hang out with friends and be comfortable with what I was eating? Is my social life going to change?”

After vertical sleeve surgery in February 2019, Young’s social life did change. “In a great way,” she says. “Now I’m more social. Before, I was timid going out. I felt like I was always being judged because of my weight.”

Now, “it’s not the first thing I’m thinking about when I walk into a room.”

Young said though she was in her early 20s, she had toyed with the idea of weight-loss surgery for a while. “I had always been an athlete. I’d done all the fad diets and I was fed up.”

Despite playing sports and watching her diet, weight was always an issue. “For some reason my body just always wanted to hold onto the weight. It didn’t matter how much I ate, how much I worked out.” But the weight-loss surgery was instantly different. “This was the one thing that gave it a jolt to start losing the weight.”

The Center for Weight Loss & Wellness was her first choice because she was already familiar with MultiCare and felt confident about the care she would receive.

“I just started scheduling appointments and never stopped,” she says with a chuckle.

She weighed 245 pounds at the time of surgery. “My highest weight was 265.” Today she’s happily maintaining at 135.

Young says her friends and family are thrilled with one particular result of the surgery. “They loved me before and they love me now, but I hear that I smile a lot more now.”

It’s the response of strangers that has changed the most. “People actually see me rather than see my weight.”

Young says the changes to her eating habits were pretty easy. The hardest part is other people. “People are always asking if I like their food. They think you don’t like it because you don’t eat much of it.”

Clothes shopping — both online and in-person — is a lot more fun now. Before, she wouldn’t even look in certain stores, describing one major retailer’s clothes as “just mean.”

“As a young person I didn’t want to have to shop in what I considered my Mom’s section,” she says. Now she can go anywhere and if she orders clothes online and they are too small, “it doesn’t upset me like it did before,” she says. “Now I know these clothes are dumb, they’re not me.”

Though she was active before, Young’s energy level is dramatically higher now. She recalls a hike where she easily passed her companions, got to the top and kept going. Another time she decided to run until she got tired and hit five miles. “Those two moments were really big for me,” she says. “I didn’t know my full potential until I didn’t put a limit on it and I just did it.”

Young says she’s glad she didn’t wait to have surgery because she has more time to enjoy all the benefits, and she encourages other young people not to wait until their weight begins impacting their health. “Go live your life because it’s a lot more fun when you aren’t thinking about your weight.”

Learn more about bariatric surgery at MultiCare.