Fat Burning vs. Carb Burning: The Truth About Your Body's Fuel - Casey Ruff

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Jack Heald: Welcome back folks. My guest today is Casey Ruff. Casey and I know each other because we both host podcasts, but you in particular should follow Casey, Boundless Body Radio, is that right Casey?

Casey Ruff: That is right. Yeah, that's the podcast we started in what was it? October of 2020.

Jack Heald: He and I, it turns out, have interviewed a lot of the same people, and that has given us something in common.

But Casey is such a unique Occupy is such a unique Niche in this metabolic health space that I thought given just the breadth of people he is interviewed and his own personal experience, he'd be a great guest for the show. So let's dive into it. Casey, what one specific health issue do you want to address today?

Casey Ruff: I would love to address the ability of our bodies to burn fat versus our body's ability to burn carbohydrates.

Jack Heald: Okay, I want to remind our listeners, question three is going to be, what's the big misconception? But before we let Casey answer that, I'm going to say, hey, so question two, what got you interested in this particular issue?

Casey Ruff: When I became trained as a personal trainer, I was also trained to use what is called a metabolic heart, which is a tool that we use to measure metabolism.

Not only the amount of energy or calories that somebody is using, whether they're resting or walking or running or sprinting or whatever that is, but also allows us to measure the amount of fat. Versus carbohydrates are two fuel sources that we burn inside the body. There was a tool that I used for over a decade. When I was working at the company I was working for, eventually I was trained to go out and teach other personal trainers how to use this tool and how to interpret the results. Essentially this would be a machine attached to an umbilical device that would hook onto a mask that would measure your breathing.

And if we can collect your breathing and break down the amount of breathing that you're doing, but also how your body is utilizing oxygen, we can tell you not only how many calories you're burning, but also where those calories are coming from.

Most of us have a goal of being very good at burning fat.

Whether you have too much fat that you want to get rid of, whether you are an endurance athlete and you're trying to get better at endurance sports and burn higher amounts of fat so you don't burn as much of the carbohydrates whether you are interested in your general health and want to make sure that your brain is functioning properly, your organs are functioning properly we want to teach people how to burn fat.

So the course of my career. Was understanding what that process looked like, how to increase that to help people get whatever their particular goal was. And in the environment that we live in, we are very limited in our ability to be able to burn fat because of, again, things that we find all over the place in our environments.

Jack Heald: So now question three, what's the biggest popular misconception about this fat burning?

Casey Ruff: I would say the biggest misconception is that people want to lose weight versus they want to lose fat. I think everybody, most people have a goal of trying to reduce their, you know, gravity here on planet earth, which is your weight.

A lot of the new weight loss drugs are becoming very popular and people are losing a lot of weight, but we're also learning that those people are losing weight that they don't necessarily want to be losing. If you've ever heard of like ozempic face, or you've heard about the muscle loss that people are having on some of these drugs.

That is good weight that you want to maintain. What most people, when they tell me that they want to lose weight, what I'm really hearing and interpreting is you don't want to lose weight, you want to lose fat. And there are certain conditions again, that we can get inside the body so that it will burn off the fat and use the fat as fuel, but also not burn off the other things that are desirable and things that you will want to continue to maintain.

Jack Heald: Okay. Let's get into the meat of this subject then, because we want people to know the truth. What is the truth about our body's ability to metabolize fat? What do we need to know factually about this?

Casey Ruff: You need to know that burning fat is your God-given, whatever you want to say, universe-given, evolved, whatever to burn fat and enjoy the benefit of being very good at burning fat.

It is a very clean and efficient fuel source that we can live on for a very long time. Most of us store tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of calories of fat energy that we can use anytime. Thank you. And we can create the conditions to run our life and run our entire life's battery on that energy system that we're literally just carrying around with us all the time.

And when we do that, we achieve really great levels of health. We can become very lean, burn off the fat that we already have. Like I said, you can have very good energy and energy for endurance. You can have great mental clarity. A lot of the issues that people are dealing with today and chronic diseases are diseases that came from being in an absence of burning fat and burning primarily the other fuel source that we find quite abundantly around us.

Which is carbohydrates. The truth is we came from an evolution where carbohydrates were exceedingly rare to us as a species, to be able to consume, to use as a fuel source. We needed maybe fruits or, you know, vegetables weren't really grown as a thing, maybe some grains or whatever you found would be very seasonal very rare.

Competing with lots of other animals to try to consume those things where we as humans got really good at skills and hunting and cooking, and we can live much more healthfully on fats and proteins than we can on carbohydrates and those types of food that come from plants. So the truth. That is our birthright that all of us have as humans.

Jack Heald: So why don't we? What's obviously if we're eating a lot of carbs, that's part of the problem, but go deeper. What is preventing us from being healthy? Fat-burning machines rather than carb-burning machines, or maybe a better question is

Casey Ruff: Let's take a look, yeah, let's take a look at what we would consider to be healthy foods. It's a little bit weird when you think about it that I could travel to Toronto and go to Whole Foods in April and I could buy as many apples as I want. I could go to Fairbanks, Alaska and buy mangoes and I could eat those pretty much all year round. Over the course of you know, the human species developing technologies, we can refrigerate things, we can treat things, we can transport things all over the planet.

So we've lost the seasonality in things like fruits or the plants that we consume. In the past, you would have had fruit for a very limited amount of time. You may have stumbled upon a few tubers. Likely they were very poisonous or they weren't bred like they were today to be giant and sweet tasting.

They had other plant toxins in them. You would use them for a time and eventually, that time would go away the freeze would come or that food would be eaten and consumed to go away and you wouldn't have access to that food anymore. And again, what I'm just talking about just right now is what we can agree on is probably the healthier options for transporting things like fruit and plants around the diet.

What about when we add to that equation, the refinement of sugar? The refinement of grains, makes those two things extremely shelf-stable and popular and inexpensive and accessible around the planet. All we've done is just taken something that we evolved with to, to really drive towards when we got it, which is consuming carbohydrates.

And it's more of a supply problem where now we're exposed to so much of a supply of carbohydrates. They're very easy to overconsume. And when your body is consuming them, your body is creating. An emergency kind of toxic kind of a mix that it needs to start to get rid of. And that's where we encountered the hormone insulin eventually becoming insulin resistant.

And we limit our ability to burn fat as a fuel source because we're always stuffing it away and storing it because we've got too many carbohydrates or they're then driving too much of the insulin, which again, we know can cause insulin resistance, which eventually leads to Type two diabetes, dementia, Alzheimer's, PCOS, erectile dysfunction, heart disease, you name it.

As far as chronic diseases.

Jack Heald: So you said something that, honest to God I have never heard anybody say when we over-consume what historically have simply been seasonal fruits and vegetables, seasonal carbohydrates, when we over-consume those, we trigger a, a. Toxicity response in our bodies. I don't think that's exactly what you said, but an emergency response.

Casey Ruff: We have an emergency system in our body to deal with the toxic load of carbohydrates when we consume them. It's an emergency system. It's there for when we need it. Again, if you think of our evolution, how often really in most temperate climates, and even I would argue tropical climates, do you really get super high amounts of very edible carbohydrates?

It's probably really rare. When you consume them, the carbohydrates converting to glucose and then get into your blood very quickly. Your body has five litres of blood and in that five litres, you only have one teaspoon of carbohydrate. It's a teeny tiny amount. Anything above that is very toxic. It can cause damage.

Sugar is really bad inside the blood where it ends up and so we have a signal which is insulin that gets the carbohydrate, the glucose, out of the blood and puts it into storage for use to be burned off later on. If that is happening rarely, sparingly, the emergency system can kick in when it needs to do its job and then be done and not have to continually work when we are exposed to high carbohydrate foods all day, every day.

Every month, every year for a decade, two decades, three decades and on, we are running an emergency system over and over and over again, just like you would run a, for formula one car as your day-to-day car. If you're reading a very high octane. car that requires tons of gas and fuel and running it hot for a long time.

That is not going to last very long. And the same thing happens with that emergency system. When it breaks, we manifest chronic disease. This is how we get type 2 diabetes. We are no longer able. to produce enough insulin to respond to this crisis, this emergency that we've been facing for way too long.

If people realized that we need to run the other system, which is our day-to-day normal efficient system, if we run that and only use the emergency system for emergencies, everything would work perfectly well. And people can appreciate and you know, enjoy really healthy, happy lives.

Jack Heald: I've never heard anyone refer to our body's response to excess carbs as an emergency response to toxins, but that makes so much sense.

It strikes me as like using your emergency brake on your car instead of just, you know, The normal brakes every time you need to stop, rather than using the standard brakes. That emergency brake is there for one specific, fairly rare purpose, not for constant daily use mile after mile after mile.

Casey Ruff: Go to the mall. Go to the mall. Go to the airport. Go walk around anywhere and just observe. We're there. A likely outcome is the outcome that you're seeing around you all the time.

You see that every handicapped space at the grocery store is taken. You see that all of the electronic scooters are being used so that people can't move around. We have obesity that is skyrocketing. Diabetes is increasing everywhere. The number one thing that we spend money on in this country is the medical system.

I'll steal this from one of my other podcast guests, Nina Teicholz. What is the nicest, newest, brightest building in your city right now? It's the new dialysis center. It's the new cancer center. It is the new add-on to the hospital where it's like a massive hotel's worth of hospital. Rooms and all of this money.

You don't need to contemplate what it might be like. You can just go look around and we're in it right now. It's really unfortunate because we lied to people about how we could fix the problem and told them it was things like calories and it's the cholesterol and it's saturated fat because we needed to find solutions for problems.

And none of that was ever borne out. And now we have a huge health crisis. So unfortunately we have a tsunami of metabolic diseases, the chronic kinds of diseases that people develop. And it happens younger and younger. We see people get dementia at age 40. People get type two diabetes in their twenties fatty liver in, in children and teenagers. I mean, just we're there. Unfortunately, it's not great.

Jack Heald: This is my favourite part. Second, what's the specific action you're a listener? You find you, you see yourself in this description. What do I do? What, where do I start? What is the step I have to take to either reverse this problem?

Casey Ruff: This is the optimistic side of things, knowing that, yes, this can be prevented. This can also be reversed if you find yourself in this position again, we live in an abundance of a fuel source that drives our use of an emergency energy system inside the body. So we need to cool it. We need to give that system a break.

We can do that. By remembering what we always used to consume as humans, we would consume vastly greater amounts of proteins and fats than we ever would carbohydrates. If we give our body some seasonality and make it think that it's in winter time and the plant foods and the fruits and vegetables, let alone all the processed and ultra-processed crap that people eat is off the table. It's no longer available. The body will then have to shift and go back to burning in its normal efficient fuel source and its normal energy system, which uses fat as fuel. When we do that, we liberate fat cells that are overstuffed. We can start to use that energy. We reduce our weight.

We do so in a way that we don't become very hungry. We improve our brain function. We have better energy. Weight loss is very effective and very much more effortless in that state. It is accessible and available to everybody listening to this show. If they focus on fats and proteins and get their carbohydrates down as low as they can, as low as they can tolerate, they can shift their metabolism back to our normal natural state, which is burning fat and enjoying all of those benefits.

Jack Heald: I'm not going to confuse it by asking more questions. That seems pretty straightforward. All right. Let's talk to Casey Ruff personally. I know you coach a lot of people. What's one of the most common compliments you hear in your work?

Casey Ruff: Oh, geez. Good question. I don't know. I hate doing this.

Jack Heald: I know, but too bad your guests on my show,

Casey Ruff: Damn it.

I just had the opportunity recently to interview somebody I've looked up to for more than a decade, her name is Dr. Kate Shanahan. She talks about seed oils in her research. I have had her book, Deep Nutrition, one of her very first books for years. I told her that it was very special to me and I'd had the book in my car and like anytime I had a break wherever I was, I had to wait for my car to get serviced or a haircut or whatever, I'd flip open her book and read. I told her how meaningful that was. We had our appointment. She's very busy. She reached out to me last week after we finished this interview. After my first time talking with her and said, Casey, I've done lots of different interviews. This one was really special. I really thank you very much for doing it. I mean, that's a pretty good compliment.

I might frame it, or at least post it on the fridge for a little while, so next time I feel down about myself, I can go back and read that, and yeah, you and I are very fortunate to interview some amazing people, we're fortunate enough to know each other, and yeah that's a very kind compliment. A compliment that I'm proud of.

Jack Heald: Do you hear what kind of complaints are common?

Casey Ruff: My favourite, we have only five-star reviews on our show, except for one, which is a one-star. And the person said this person gets really good guests, and I really liked the guests. I just can't stand the host's voice.

Which I could appreciate. I hate my own voice. We do get that complaint every now and again, our sound quality isn't great on YouTube.

Jack Heald: That's funny, I hate this voice. Oh gosh.

Casey Ruff: Good guests. Like the thing said, it would have been worth like a three-star or maybe a four-star, but it had to be of course a one-star, you know?

Jack Heald: In my real job, which is marketing and branding consulting were you one of my clients? I'd say, Hey man, that's actually very helpful. Your haters are really the best advertisement. A star review is meh, but a one-star review reveals a whole lot more, especially when that's their biggest complaint. I don't like your voice.

Casey Ruff: That's a good point. I like that.

Jack Heald: All right. This is my favorite question. This is the billboard question.

The best billboards have very few words and get the idea across very quickly simply because we're driving too fast to really be able to read a billboard. We tell our clients, to limit the number of words on your billboard to no more than eight. So if you could deliver just one message about health and had only eight words to deliver it in, what would those eight words be?

Casey Ruff: Eat meat, only when hungry. Mostly beef.

Jack Heald: Ooh, you and I are soul brothers, mostly. My wife tried to eat the way I eat all the time and it her body's just not built for beef like mine is. Apparently some people process fatty meats better and some people process leaner meats better. She loves fish and chicken.

I would be perfectly happy if I never had fish or chicken cross my palate ever again, but beef. all day, every day. That sounds like a great idea. All right. Casey rough boundless body radio. Thanks for being with us. Real quickly where can folks connect with you?

Casey Ruff: Thank you so much, Jack.

Always a pleasure to talk to you. People can go to our website, which is www.myboundlessbody.com. They'll find all the resources that they need there and can contact us there if they like.

Jack Heald: Sounds good. We'll talk to y'all next time.

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