Mari is married to one of our employees, so when InBody found out she was excited to get back in shape and needed an accurate way to track her progress, we offered to give her our new H20N scale to help with her journey—this is her story.
The fourth trimester
Traditionally, the focus of a pregnancy has been on the first three trimesters, but many women are starting to pay attention to the fourth trimester—the 12 weeks following birth. During this time, you are learning how to balance taking care of your new baby while learning how to take care of yourself, which includes starting or getting back into a fitness routine.
Once you get your doctor’s approval, it can be both physically and mentally exhausting to get into your exercise routine. For Mari, a lifelong fitness enthusiast and proud new mom, it was a challenge to be patient with her body as she recovered from delivery. A critical part of Mari’s success was her InBody H20N, a smart weight analyzer, that gave her the data points she needed to visualize her journey and stay on track to meet her health goals.
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle using body composition
Mari is extremely active—when she is not running marathons, she is working on her Olympic lifts. As someone who cares deeply about her health and physique, she regularly tested her body composition on the InBody 770.
The Result Sheet gave her a lot of in-depth information that helped her really understand her body composition, gain valuable health insights, and set fitness goals. A concept that she came to understand was that weight gain did not necessarily mean muscle gain.
Using the InBody 770 definitely was eye-opening …I thought I wanted to gain weight because I wanted my strength to go up… seeing the body fat and the muscle mass was eye-opening to me. [I] realized that how I’ve been interpreting weight was not entirely correct.
A New Schedule, A New Routine
In December 2018, Mari learned she was pregnant for the first time. With all of the preparations they needed to make for the baby, things understandably got more hectic—but she wanted to stay active during and after her pregnancy.
To help with her fitness goals, she and her husband built a home gym and received an InBody H20N to help her track her progress. The H20N is InBody’s first smart home scale that measures total body composition and can be used to track changes in muscle mass and body fat.
The H20N would allow Mari to continue testing her body composition post-pregnancy in the comfort of her home at a time when it would be difficult to visit a facility to test on a professional InBody device.
Three weeks after giving birth Mari felt ready to “bounce back” and start working out again. She started testing on the H20N in her bedroom during mornings. Testing was quick and easy—Mari would step onto the device, lift the handles, and 8 seconds later she would get all of her essential metrics like muscle mass, percent body fat, and body fat mass. All of the data was stored on her InBody App and she was able to compare her metrics from previous tests she took on the InBody 770.
Understanding Your Unique Journey
It can take time to learn how to readjust to your body after pregnancy. For someone who stayed as active as Mari did during her pregnancy (she had gone on a 4-mile walk on the day she gave birth!), even she was taken aback by her numbers when she first stepped on the H20N.
It kinda got overwhelming seeing the muscle numbers and the fat numbers the first two times I tested (on the H20N)—it wasn’t what I was expecting.
For Mari, the biggest change she faced in her postpartum journey was learning how to accept the changes in her body and view them as a part of the complete journey.
My husband reminded me that I just went through something huge that most people don’t go through… The H20N helped me to not focus so much on the weight number and focus more on the body fat and the muscle”
Over time, she found it easier to focus on the journey and celebrate the changes—big and small—in muscle and body fat. Using the H20N also helped Mari see the changes she needed to make to get the results she wanted. By testing consistently, Mari learned that she needed to make adjustments to her diet plan.
Both her body and schedule had changed, so she had to adjust her nutrition plan if she wanted to reach her health goals.
Fitness is easy for me. I’ve always been one [to think] that I can outwork my diet. So seeing the H20N results, it kind of helped tighten up the nutrition area. [I started] focusing on the fact that I need to eat healthy to see a change in body fat and working on my diet to see how that can affect the numbers as well.
The Next Chapter
Becoming a new mom is both an exciting and overwhelming time. You want to devote your entire self to your newborn, but at the same time it is important to take care of yourself so you can be the best mom you can be.
It can be scary to step on the scale for the first time after giving birth and see how your body has changed, but Mari wants to remind new moms that getting back in shape takes time.
Most women don’t step back and take the time to think about the changes their body experienced—they just see the numbers and get overwhelmed.
But if you were active before, remember it’s going to be just a new schedule and a new routine. You can’t really harp on the numbers and stuff like that. They’ll come with time.
Using technology like the H20N can be a great tool to help any new mom looking to either resume their fitness journey like Mari or start a new one. The fast, accurate, and precise results will give you numbers you can trust and compare over time to help guide you through the fourth trimester and beyond.
