Better Nutrition February 2019

thewiseFATBURNER/STORIES OF TRANSFORMATION FROM NUTRITION & LEPTIN PIONEER KAT JAMES
Breathing
Easy Again
When singer Carla Young-Ellsman was
diagnosed with airway abnormalities,
she stumbled across an
unlikely cure /// BY KAT JAMES
In the mid-1990s, velvet-voiced Carla
Young-Ellsman of Hawaii had a budding
singing and recording career that ground
to a sudden halt when her father fell ill.
Having lost her mother at a young age,
Carla gladly signed on to be his caretaker.
Before long, she added her father-in-law’s
care to her responsibilities, starting a
long and dangerous detour in her own
life and health. The heart-breaking loss
of two close friends, as well as her two
beloved border collies—all within a
two-year period—left Carla emotionally
numb and increasingly isolated and
fearful of attachments.
Her self-destructive relationship
with food added to her numbness …
and her size, which grew from an 8 to
a 14, to a tight “large,” at which point
she stopped wearing “real clothes” and
started wearing elastic pants and huge
T-shirts to hide herself. She pretty much
stopped leaving the house, turning down
virtually all social invitations. “I basically
shut down, emotionally and physically,”
Carla says. “The rest of my family had
all become diabetic. I was determined
not to go down that road, but despite my
constant low-fat dieting, I couldn’t lose
the weight.”
Over the next several years, Carla was
diagnosed with insulin resistance, fatty
liver, and gallbladder problems. A stress
test came back abnormal. These issues
hampered her ability to care for her dad
and father-in-law, not to mention eroded
her self-image and her hopes of returning
to her singing career. After several
years, Carla started assisting a local holistic
veterinarian to help make ends meet.
Carla singing with
her band, Nueva
Vida in the late
1990s (above), and
Carla today with
husband Eric, after their
life-changing transformation
(right). “My
friends can’t believe
how my appearance
and shape have
changed,” she says.
How Airway Constriction
Threatened Carla’s Health
In mid-2017, Carla’s dentist noticed that
her airways were constricted and that
her tooth enamel was eroding due,
in part, to teeth grinding. He convinced
her to do a sleep study, where they
found that her breathing was interrupted
an incredible 19 times per hour!
Carla’s airway constriction threatened
her overall health and even her heart.
Indeed, she’d been having intermittent
Charlie horse-type pains in her chest and
even weakness on the left side of her
body for years, which were found to be
related to one of her heart valves. Carla’s
dentist urged her to see one of Hawaii’s
top speech pathologists, Carolinda “Trini”
Murphy, about her airway issues. Murphy
confirmed soft tissue abnormalities
affecting Carla’s tongue mobility, and
also a swallowing muscle dysfunction.
Most concerning, Carla’s Mallampati
score—a rating of the size of a person’s
airway capacity—was a IV, the maximum
degree of constriction on the medical
rating scale. This had resulted in darkness
under her eyes (called “shiners” in Murphy’s
line of work), serious exhaustion, and
narcoleptic episodes where she’d unwittingly
drift off to sleep many times per day. Carla
soon underwent surgery to increase her
tongue mobility and was next looking at
more serious surgery to open her airways.
Hoping to avoid it, she pursued Murphy’s
state-of-the-art training and stretching
program to open her tiny airways, and
was also put on a CPAP device to ease
her breathing at night. The CPAP lessened
the literal “heartache” she often woke up
with due to lack of oxygen.
Weight Issues & Food Cravings
Despite faithful compliance to all of her
regimens, Carla’s weight, food cravings,
and occasional heart twinges persisted.
And as hard as she tried, she still couldn’t
coordinate her swallowing muscles to drink
normally, or enlarge her airway, even after
doing Murphy’s advanced exercises and
stretches—which had been successful for
other patients. “After consulting with
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