About

Here at Myomytv.com, I (Marianne Kane) am very passionate about health and fitness.  My aim is to share my experience and tips for those of you who are like-minded or thinking about a change in your lifestyle.  I don’t claim to know it all, but I would like this blog to become a living record of my journey to attain better health and fitness.  I hope that you all would join me and give me your thoughts along the way.

My hope is that this site will appeal to people with varying degrees of knowledge in fitness and nutrition thus creating a catalogue of information suitable for any stage of the journey.

A little about me

My name is Marianne, I’m 30 years old and, as you’ve probably gathered, I love fitness. I am a qualified Fitness and Extreme Kettlebell Instructor, so I have a foundation of both evidence-based knowledge and skills in current fitness understanding.

In my working life (outside of the blog and fitness), I am a Staff Nurse in a busy Cardiac Surgery ward.  I enjoy my work as a nurse but I feel my heart (pardon the pun) lies in fitness and helping people reach their FULL physical potential by support and example – by sharing my journey as I reach mine.

Now on to my fitness background.  I was very sporty in school and excelled at athletics for a while, mainly 100m sprint and long jump. Unfortunately I didn’t get very far with it due to hip and knee pains (which turned out to be early sypmtoms of a condition not yet diagnosed) , so I quit.  Gradually, through my early 20′s I piled on the pounds and was ignorant to how to make good food choices.  I became very lazy with exercise and wondered how and if ever I would lose the weight.

During university I had to walk a lot and weight started to drop off, but my diet still wasn’t in check, so my weight would fluctuate greatly.  When I started becoming more aware of what was in certain foods, I was able to avoid them and have more consistent results with my weight loss.  I was never that overweight, but I did feel the negative effects it had, especially on my confidence.

At one point I was losing too much weight and I was also having severe lower back and hip pain, to the point I could hardly walk, lie in bed, or change position when I was in bed.  After many trips to the doctor and physio (over the course of 2 years) I was eventually diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondilytis (an inflammatory arthritis of the tendons and ligaments, mainly in the spine).  As it turned out the best way preventing permanent fusing of the spine from occurring was to stay supple and exercise.  So exercise I did.  At times the pain was still too much as the treatment wasn’t effective enough, so progress was slow.

I am now nearly 3 years after my diagnosis and I have only just been commenced on the first medication to successfully alleviate my inflammation and pain completely, thus allowing me to exercise to my full abilities.  And it’s great! This medication (Enbrel) is a weekly injection which prevents my immune system from “attacking” itself.  However this can mean that my immunity to other illnesses and ailments is also affected. But so far so good.  At the same time as I started this medication I was becoming more serious with my Kettlebell training and I attribute my strength gains and rehab to Kettlebell training.

The reason I am sharing this story is that I want people to know that it can be a long journey to reach a goal but it’s so rewarding when you reach it.  People might assume by my appearance now that I haven’t had to work or battle for my fitness and health, but one of the reasons I started this blog is I hope to be an inspiration to someone in a similar situation.  Or at least provide the platform for people to share their stories, journeys or goals and build a community of support for one another.

I think everyone needs somebody to show them direction and help sort through all the conflicting information we are bombarded with on a daily basis. So again I hope this site will shed some light on these matters for you guys too.