Nwankwo Kanu won the Premier League, FA Cup, Champions League and UEFA Cup. As captain of Nigeria he became an Olympic Gold medallist and twice won African Player of the Year. Kanu is a member of the Invincibles: the Arsenal side that finished the 2003-04 season undefeated. He famously scored a hat-trick in fifteen minutes against Chelsea to turn a 2–0 deficit into a 3–2 victory.

But in 2014, 8 years after he first had urgent surgery to replace an aortic valve, Amara and Nwankwo were lying in bed together when she noticed that something didn’t sound right about his heartbeat. The rhythm was “irregular”. Amara encouraged Nwankwo to get his heartbeat checked – an intuition that proved her fears to be true. He was a “walking time-bomb” and she quite literally saved his life. In no time, he was sent to Ohio to have life-saving open-heart surgery

Now his wife Amara, who married Kanu when she was 18, has channelled all the diet and fitness knowledge she has learned over the years into a new book called Healthy Living with Amara Kanu, stressing, “Listening to your body could save your life”.

Healthy Living with Amara Kanu

Following the recent death of Ivorian footballer Cheick Tiote on the pitch, and Fabrice Muamba’s cardiac arrest in March 2012, Amara has dedicated her book to her husband and the other sporting greats who have lost their lives and suffered from heart problems.

Still a size 10 after having three children (Sean, 12, Ian, 10 and Pinky, 5), Amara proactively devised healthy lifestyle rules, food choice plans and fitness guides to help every woman, regardless of their shape, age and size.

The creative entrepreneur, who has used her qualifications in Architecture and Entrepreneurial Management to channel her unique brand into a true lifestyle product, is now working on her passion as a fitness enthusiast and lives in a £6 million mansion in Barnet, North London.

Amara and Nwankwo channel a great deal of time and passion into the Kanu Heart Foundation. To date, the couple have saved the lives of 532 young people.

We have a signed copy of Amara’s book ‘Healthy Living with Amara Kanu’ to give away. To win a copy follow @able2uk find the relevant post at RT it.