Kellyanne using hot yoga to maintain healthy lifestyle

Kellyanne using hot yoga to maintain healthy lifestyle

16 June 2021

KELLYANNE McKendry is used to living life in the fast lane as a former jet-setting international model.

Still modelling today, Kellyanne is also a business owner, yoga teacher, wedding florist, part-time university student, goldsmith, soon to be television presenter as well as being a mother of two daughters.

The Crossgar woman’s zest for life and learning now needs to be curbed occasionally on discovering she suffers from a rare but reversible form of stroke.

The 43 year-old has been diagnosed with reversible cerebral vasoconstriction syndrome, a condition which mimics the effects of a stroke but does not cause any damage to the brain.

“I’m always going to be at risk of having another one. There’s nothing they can do and no medication I can take,” explained Kellyanne. “I am very healthy but it’s more about having to be really hard on myself and telling myself to slow things down and take it easy.

“Because I’m operating at 100mph every day, the brain can’t cope and it’s like a computer overloading. It needs to shut down so my brain just shuts itself off. 

“The blood vessels constrict and no blood gets to the brain.You pass out and lose your gross motor skills. For me, it lasts normally a few minutes before it improves, like a computer rebooting.”

While having her first episode five years where she lost her speech in front of her daughters, Kellyanne’s last episode was last December. 

“It was very scary as being treated in hospital was a lot more heightened because of the covid restrictions. No-one was allowed to come with me and I was on my own in the ambulance,” she said.

“The doctors have told me that while it is reversible, there is no long-term damage to the brain but that I can’t take a chance as the symptoms mimic a stroke. 

“You have to treat it like you have have a stroke when it happens and call for an ambulance as you can’t take a chance with it.”

She manages her condition by monitoring her ECG and other bodily indicators, such her cardiac rhythms and blood pressure, with her Apple watch. 

“I can see when there might be an onset and then I can say to my daughters that something might happen soon,” she revealed.

She does need to keep an eye on herself as her natural inclination is to live life to the full.

She has recently resumed her Hot Yoga Studio classes in Downpatrick, being the only practitioner of Bikram yoga.

Kellyanne is a devotee of hot yoga which is performed at 42 degree C heat and 40 degree humidity in a darkened studio.

Burning 420 calories an hour, the heat helps the body release any toxins through perspiration and helps make the body more flexible in order to get into the deep stretches.

Kellyanne is also soon opening a new Reformer and Pilates Studio in Market Lane and establishing a marital arts franchise club as well in Downpatrick.

She also works as a freelance floral wedding designer for Blossom ad Birch in Ballymena; owns Harron & Co goldsmiths and works as a goldsmith and is starting a Sports Science university degree in the autumn.

“I have worked in some movies over the years, such as Killing Bono and Your Highness and I hope to be TV presenting over the next few months,” she adds to her growing list of accomplishments.

Kellyanne is the eldest daughter of Seamus and Helen McKendry, who live between Killyleagh and Crossgar. 

Helen is the eldest child of Belfast mother-of-10 Jean McConville — one of ‘The Disappeared’ who was abducted and murdered by the IRA in 1972. She has tirelessly campaigned over the years for truth and justice for those responsible for her mother’s death. 

It was both Kellyanne’s and her mother’s dream that she would become a model.

She got her first taste of the catwalk taking part in a charity fashion show in Downpatick at the age of 19. 

“It was my first ever fashion show and it was in The Yard and I loved it so much, that was me,” said Kellyanne. “Once I did that show, I got offers from agents and things started from then. I was a trainee accountant at that time and then modelling happened for me. Such two worlds apart.”

The following year Kellyanne won the Sunday Life Covergirl competition and at the age of 21 she then was one of the finalists in RTE’s Model Behaviour, the broadcaster’s version of Britain’s Next Top Model, and secured a contract with Select Models London.

“At first I was known as an editorial girl — that’s where they launch you into the industry and they want to make your name known, like Agyness Deyn, who I worked with.

“It was mostly photographic and for big magazines like Cosmopolitan and Vogue.

“From that I then went into what the modelling industry calls being a money girl where I would be doing make-up, perfume, lingerie campaigns.”

It was a far cry from the quiet rural upbringing she enjoyed at home but the modelling career just carried her along in its path.

“Looking back with hindsight, I wonder whether it was because I was so young that I survived it. I don’t think I could have coped if I had been older, certainly not now at 43.

“Because I was so young, I had no clue. I was living in the middle of the countryside with sheep in the next field. The next minute I’m living in this world full of glamorous models and at 100mph.”

She remembers turning up one day to a casting in just a pair of jeans and the model agency’s T-shirt.

“I was told there was a car outside where it will take you to an airport to get a plane. I remember that when I arrived I didn’t even know what country I was in. That’s the way it was, you were just sent from place to place and there were times that I was lucky even to have a toothbrush with me. It was all go, go, go.”

She gave up international modelling about 12 years ago when her youngest daughter, Felicity Boo, was about four years. 

She’s now at Down High School and headed hopefully for a law career while Kellyanne’s eldest daughter, Tiegen, is finishing her Masters degree and is already a young poet of note.

She admitted: “It’s not a lifestyle you can keep up with young children. But I kept modelling out of London, Dublin, Belfast and Germany and that was enough for me. I still work out of Belfast and Dublin.”

Many of her campaigns are still used and she is often confronted with her own image in the strangest of places.

“Every now and then I can be looking at an image, and I think, ‘that’s my eye’.

“In fact there was a Kleenex tissue box that I bought in Asda and I thought I recognised my eye on it. I was able to go back and look at the book from the shoot and there it was.

“My friend Julian Simmons of UTV was on a flight to Bangkok and was flicking through an inflight magazine and spotted me in a picture. That was in a Bangkok airline like Easyjet. You just never know where your images will show up.”

Hot Yoga Downpatrick is located in the town’s cricket club on the Strangford Road. For more information on classes, go to www.hotyogadownpatrick.co.uk.