Casey Ruff - The Fitness Coach Who Admits He Was Wrong #42

For many years, trainers used the calories in, calories out model. Even Casey Ruff has tried it and as a fitness trainer, has recommended it to his clients. But he learned it’s not sustainable.

When he became a certified nutrition coach, he witnessed people avail of different programs to develop healthy eating habits of vegetables and lean meats, only to end up not finishing the program. These nutrition programs are simply not doable.

Until he experienced the ketogenic diet and personally saw its benefits. He never looked back.

This episode focuses on personal trainer and nutrition coach Casey Ruff as he shares how he accepted his wrong notions about fitness and nutrition, his encounter with the keto diet, and what he thinks is the best nutrition advice people tend to ignore.

Quick Guide:
0:26 Introduction
2:25 The calorie in, calorie out model
6:23 The possibility to manipulate calories through nutrition
8:47 We get on to programs that don’t really work
15:06 Becoming a certified nutrition coach
18:06 Common misconceptions of clients
24:15 Casey’s personal journey
30:27 Fitness programs for the clients
35:47 Best and worst health advice
37:03 Plants don’t give you food all of 365 days
41:11 Equating food to sugar to make people buy them
42:26 We make people alive and sick
44:41 The approach to exercise

Get to know our guest:
Casey Ruff has been a personal trainer for 15 years where he focused on heart training and metabolic testing. He became a certified nutrition coach specializing in low-carb diets. He and his wife built Boundless Body during the pandemic. They offer personal training, pilates, the Rossiter System, ketogenic nutrition coaching, and cardio programming.

“It was shortly after getting into the Keto space, and I was really feeling pigeon-holed like people were coming to me because they knew I was that guy. And I didn't want to

Joburg Meats
Keto/Carnivore-friendly meat snacks. Tasty+Clean. 4 ingredients. Use code “iFixHearts” to save 15%.

Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.

So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team. 

One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started. 

--------------
Connect with Stay Off My Operating Table on X:

• Dr. Ovadia: @iFixHearts
• Jack Heald: @JackHeald5

Learn more:

• Personalized health coaching
• Stay Off My Operating Table on Amazon.
• Take Dr. Ovadia's metabolic health quiz: iFixHearts
• Dr. Ovadia's website: Ovadia Heart Health
• Jack Heald's website: CultYourBrand.com

Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings

Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from Dr. Philip Ovadia.

Transcript

Casey Ruff - A fitness coach who was wrong, and chose to learn

SUMMARY KEYWORDS 

people, eat, calories, year, gym, talking, carnivore, diet, hear, great, personal trainer, body, weight, burning, absolutely, fat, rossiter, clients, days, food 

SPEAKERS 

Jack Heald, Casey Ruff, Dr. Philip Ovadia 

Jack Heald  00:00 

Well, welcome back everybody. It's the Stay Off My Operating Table. I've only done this how many times. Stay Off My Operating Table podcast with Dr. Philip Ovadia. I'm the fairly tongue-tangled host, Jack Heald. And we've got a guest today. I'm really looking forward to, but I'm not going to introduce him. I'm going to ask you to do so Phil. 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  00:26 

Great to be back with you again, Jack and excited for another great guest today. Casey is just another one of those great people that I happen to stumble across over on the interwebs one day, and really loved his background and his messaging. And so excited to have him on for another great conversation around just approaches to health and positivity. And I'm just going to briefly say Casey's got a great program, his Boundless Body Program. His background is as a personal trainer, and I'm going to let him fill in some of the details from there. 

Casey Ruff  01:10 

Well, thank you guys so much for the opportunity to be on your podcast. I really love the show. I love your content. And it's such an honor to be here. 

Jack Heald  01:18 

Well, great. So, Casey Ruff, who the heck are you? And why are you on this show? 

Casey Ruff  01:23 

Who am I? Great question. I actually don't know why I'm on your show with the likes of some of the guests that you guys have like Cynthia. And I was just listening to the podcast you did with both Brians and they were absolutely amazing. So again, I'm really honored to be here. But I have been a personal trainer for 15 years now. We've worked in a big gym, big corporate gym for a very long time. I took a particular interest in heart rate training, and metabolic testing. So, we were using something called a metabolic cart to measure somebody's metabolism, how many calories they were burning, both at rest and as they were exercising. The exercise version a lot of people know of is like a Vo2 kind-of max test. So, we were doing that for many years. And it got to be involved in the health and fitness world for a really long time, and have evolved quite a bit over that period of time. But yeah, my initial interest was heart rate training, and helping people come up with programs to help them do their cardiovascular training better, and also help them understand how many calories they needed to be eating, which again, we've definitely changed our mind about since then. 

Jack Heald  02:22 

Well, talk about that. How has your thinking changed? 

Casey Ruff  02:25 

Yeah, so back in 2007, when I got started, again, we were using this thing called a metabolic cart, which would measure the breath that somebody was breathing in and out. And if you were to just kind of sit around and you're watching my favorite show Formula One on Netflix, it's a little bit exciting, but for the most part, your heart rate is not getting up that high, you're not breathing very much, you're not burning a lot of calories. But if I told you to go sprint down the street, obviously, you'd be breathing much, much heavier. At least I would. And that just means it's a direct byproduct of how many calories you're burning. So, if somebody comes in and they're, they're hooked up to this test, and the breathing more, we just know that they're burning more calories. And if somebody is not breathing as much, we know that they're burning less calories. And again, back in 2007, the only thing we understood for the most part is just to say like, okay, you're burning 1500 calories at rest, you have a desk job, so let's just estimate the you're burning another 500 calories. You want to lose two pounds a week. So why don't we have you exercise 500 calories, and then eat 500 calories less, and there's a deficit there. So that would be about 1000 calories less. You're burning more calories than what you're taking in. And if we do the math on that for seven days, that would be exactly two pounds, one pound is 3500 calories. And so theoretically, you just eat that number of calories. And your weight loss would just very linear drop down two pounds a week. And you could just continue doing that until you reached your weight goal. And then you could just go back to maintaining your weight at that point. Most people we explain that to now they kind of laugh and say like, yeah, that doesn't work. I know that doesn't work. I tried it. I tried it last January. I tried it the January before and the January before the January before I joined the gym. It's Monday, first Monday of January, I'm gonna go to the gym. I'm going to jump on a treadmill. I'm going to be a sweaty, hot mess until that thing says I burn 500 calories. Then I'm going to go home and eat my kale salads. And I'm going to feel great on Monday. I'll feel okay on Tuesday. I'll be pretty tired on Wednesday, but I'm gonna power through Thursday. I'm exhausted, and I'm tired. I'm craving carbohydrates and craving food. And somebody brings a box of doughnuts to the break room and I can't even contain myself and eat a bunch of doughnuts and it's like well, diet starts on Monday all over again. And it was kind of the funny joke that like all the gym regulars would kind of complain that other machines would be taken in January but all they needed to do was wait like five or six weeks and all of this crowd would kind of thin out and they'd be completely done because they were exhausted and it wouldn't work. They end up gaining more weight than they even started with. And so, it was a disaster really. It was really interesting to get all of this data, but it was extremely frustrating to not truly know how to help somebody with it. 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  05:09 

Yeah so, I think that's a great summary, a great introduction as to why you're on the show, because we've been having some very interesting discussions with physicians who were kind of trapped in a model that wasn't working. And they started asking why. And they started to think beyond that model and search out information beyond that model, and then find what would work for the people that were in front of them. And I see the story that the transformation that you went through as a personal trainer, along those same lines and here you were in a what the people who support the calorie in, calorie out model would say is that the best way to do it, you were measuring actual calories out, you were at least theoretically measuring or having people control their calories in. And yet, you weren't seeing the results that were expected from that kind of simple mathematical model. So, talk to us a little bit more about what your perception was why these things weren't working? And how you started to think beyond that simple model. 

Casey Ruff  06:23 

Sure. So, I will never forget, it was 2012. Our company was doing some work with not an employee that he was doing the same kind of metabolic testing stuff that we were doing. And he was testing very high-end triathletes. So, these are like world class people who are doing Ironman Triathlon. And he was saying that he could manipulate the calories that they were burning on the bike or on the run through changing their nutrition. And he found that he was feeding his athletes things like cream, and butter and bacon. And it's like, what? What are you talking about? That is the most insane, illogical thing I've ever heard of. In my whole cycling career, all you knew was to consume meal after meal after meal after meal of carbohydrates, or you were going to bunk. It was just a matter of time. And he's feeding these guys competing at the highest levels, like 60, or 70 calories an hour, and they were just fine. They were getting through their events and competing and doing quite well. And so first of all, that just completely blew my mind. There's maybe a year or two later that somebody started saying something about healthy fat. And you're like, what is a healthy fat? That's a complete oxymoron, everybody knows there's no such thing as a healthy fat. That's ridiculous. It was soon after that coming across the work of Nina Teicholz and her amazing book, it just started to really change and evolve my thinking. And it just so happened that in 2017, I decided that nutrition was quite a passion of mine. And I wanted to become not just a personal trainer, but also certified as a nutrition coach. And the company that I went to is very well respected. They're one of the best nutrition coaching companies in the world. And amazing education, their education platform was really good and they even offered me this this platform that I could I could use with all of my people. And it was all about like behavior change. And there would be daily lessons for all the people that I signed up for this. And they, they could report a bunch of stuff. And they work on a healthy habit like, including vegetables in every meal, and eating mindfully and getting lean protein. And it was just absolutely amazing. The course curriculum went for an entire year. And again, the curriculum was incredible. And somebody who could do it for a year would absolutely come out in a much better spot. But the problem was I literally put hundreds and hundreds of people through that program, I had two people finish. Two. And I don't know where they ended up. I know that one kind of lost a little bit of weight, but gained it all back and the other person ended up losing 60 pounds. But that person was like 400 pounds to begin with. So, we have a long way to go. 

Casey Ruff  08:47 

I kind of referenced this a lot the Seinfeld episode where Jerry makes the bet with Kramer about the levels in the house, that Kramer is going to build different levels in his house. And Jerry says I'm going to bet you that you're not going to do it. And a few days pass and Kramer says, I don't want to do that. That's stupid. And Jerry goes, well, you lost the bet. And Kramer goes no. I didn’t lose a bet. I just decided not to do it. And Jerry's like that was the bet. And it's almost like we're telling all these people, all these things that, like, make sense, like vegetables, lean proteins and lots of meals and snacks and go to your meal prep and waste six hours on a Sunday shopping for exotic ingredients and cooking them all only to throw them all away at the end of the week. It's almost like it didn't work. Not necessarily because I don't know if the plan was really good or not. But people couldn't do it. It was just not practical or doable. And again, it would just end up with so much food being thrown away at the end of the week and people not losing any significant amount of weight and if they did, they would be sacrificing muscle mass or losing a lot of water. It was just super frustrating. And so, part of what our company was doing was selling these temporary weight loss challenges. They would do them several times a year like once a quarter. It would be like a two-month challenge. We get a bunch of people; we have to sign them up. We're working 100% commission so you're just on the grind trying to Find people and get them to buy your services. And you get all these people together, you give them this 100-page manual of all the things you need to do, and a bunch of recipes and all the shopping lists that were so long. And people, again, are shopping for crazy, weird ingredients. They stay motivated for a few weeks, but inevitably, they'll fall off. Our compliance percentage was so low. And then the hard thing for us is personal trainers, my wife and I, is it three months later, you had to turn around and do it all over again. You had to sell them on the same program. But if I took you through the program, and you failed, you're not gonna be very likely to sign up a second time or third time or fourth time. So, it's basically just carousel of people. And it was really frustrating. Until one year, I was doing a consult with a guy. And he was an employee. Also, he's kind of forced to do the thing. He didn't really want to do it. And we were doing in consultation, he wanted to lose like 20 pounds. And I said, like, hey, what do you what are you eating? What's your nutrition? And he named cereal at night and toast in the morning and sandwich of lunch? And I was like, well, okay, dude, you're just not eating any fat, like, let's get some fat in the diet. Let's see how that works for you. And two days later, he came back and said, okay, I've lost a pound and a half. What is this keto stuff? And I was like, that's amazing, first of all, and second of all, I don't know enough about that. So let me get back to you. And that kind of started my journey into the low carbohydrate and keto space. And really dedicating my life and my career to what was really working. It was such an amazing relief to go from giving people advice that you thought was good, that literally worked for nobody, versus giving people a completely alternative thing that I can, like, I'm trying to find people that this won't work for, like, surely there must be some exception, somebody who doesn't thrive and lose tons of fat and doesn't feel amazing and can't start skipping meals and snacks all the time. I just can't find it. And in my job, there's no financial compensation. If somebody eats a steak or a salad, I don't get paid. If somebody wants to be vegan or carnivore, it doesn't matter to me. I need to do the best for my clients. I need to get them the best results and whatever that is. And so that's when we really shifted what we were trying to do. And my wife and I were sitting around talking about the next challenge that was coming up. And we just kind of said, like, what if we go rogue? What if we don't do what our company is telling us to do? What if we make different meal plans that are really easy that people love? Let's do some seminars. Let's teach them a little bit about this, that's helped them out through the challenge in a different way and show them everything you've been told has been wrong, and you've tried it so you know what's wrong, let's try something different. And we were really fortunate enough to have a scale to measure body fat percentage. And we were validating that people were losing tremendous amounts of weight that was coming from fat. It wasn't a controlled trial, but over the course of many of these challenges, hundreds of people doing these challenges, were getting this data, some people are old, some people are young men and female, some people wanted to specifically lose weight, other people didn't want to lose weight, they wanted to gain muscle. And over the course of collecting all that data, it was incredibly effective. And so that's just kind of what we did. We never really told the company what we were doing. But it's kind of fun, because we would in our group, we told people, you're the rogue group, and we'd always have a winner coming out of our group. And it just completely changed my career as far as like, what I'm going to tell people is actually going to work. 

Jack Heald  13:17 

Okay, so I just want to make sure that I can summarize what I hear you saying. You had all the education and all the training and all the experience about the right way, air quotes, to eat and to exercise. And in the industry, you watched this happen and watched people consistently fail. 

Casey Ruff  13:41 

Yes, yes. Straight up yes.  

Jack Heald  13:44 

And all of your colleagues were seeing the exact same thing. And certification schools. We're seeing the same thing, but teaching this anyway. And it wasn't until you stumbled on this, clearly maverick kind of approach, that you started to actually have clients get the results they wanted. 

Casey Ruff  14:15 

Effortlessly. Yeah. 

Jack Heald  14:19 

What is it about human beings that we have to get our faces rubbed in it before we finally go, “oh, look, that old way isn't working?” I mean, Casey, we hear the same story, yeah, week after week, after week after week after week. But it's just it's amazing to me. 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  14:38 

It's amazing how we hear it from all the different parts of the healthcare, air quotes as well, industry. So just to continue on. Sure, then that you went to your company and you said, look, I'm getting all these great results with this alternative program and they celebrated you and promoted you and said, “oh, we gotta get everyone doing this,” right? 

Casey Ruff  15:06 

The only reason I chose to go down the nutrition path and get certified as a nutrition coach is because I was demoted from my regional role. Because I was overseeing so many other different clubs and had to train their personal trainers to do what I was doing with metabolic coaching that my own sales numbers at my main club had to fall because I was traveling all the time. And so, they demoted me from the position. I was actively dropping in this company that I've worked for over a decade. And just like every other challenge in life, it's so funny that some of the biggest obstacles and the biggest difficult moments end up being the things that point you in the right direction. And that certainly was my experience. I would have never found any of this had I not gone down the nutrition road and had I sold more stuff to more people that they didn't need, I wouldn't have ever gotten demoted from a job that I absolutely loved at that time. So yeah, it's Yeah, bananas. 

Jack Heald  16:03 

I don't want to go too far down that road. But I'm just fascinated that even in the fitness industry, not the health care industry, which for all intents and purposes is as best as I can tell owned by insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, the fitness industry seems like the place where people are looking at results and are open to new ways of thinking and finding new ways of getting stuff done. It's just fascinating to me that even a nutrition certification company doesn’t get it. 

Casey Ruff  16:36 

Yeah, yeah. It had a certain way of doing things. And every two years, I have to pass a test from that company. And so, I have to brush up on the book and say the things I need to say, and even the word ketosis is in the book, I had to go back and dig for it later on. But it's in there. And it talks about the biology of burning fat and how that produces ketones. It's only like one sentence. It's not really expound on that pretty much just the one thing, but yeah, people acknowledge it, but then they teach something that's totally different. It just makes no sense. I do have to point out like, one advantage that I have is I am a certified personal trainer, and I am a certified nutrition coach, I am not somebody that has a four-year, a six-year degree, a doctorate. And I am not a registered dietician. So, I have a piece of paper that says, like, I know something about food, but I'm not held to the same standards as somebody like a registered dietitian is and so there's pros and cons to each. But it doesn't allow me to explore things that other people are not exploring and be able to introduce that to my clients and say, look like I can't prescribe anything, I can't tell you how to eat this way. But here's some cool things that I've learned along the way. Here's the data of all the people we take it through this. You can decide what you want to do and if you want to follow this path, follow these people, and you'll find the right path. And so, you felt like you have to go against what the medical industry was telling you. And that's a whole different thing. So, in that way, I kind of had a bit of an advantage. 

Jack Heald  18:06 

So, what's one of the most common misconceptions that you address with clients or potential clients? 

Casey Ruff  18:15 

Great question. Generally speaking, it is related to what we've already talked about, which is the calories in and calories out equation. If I asked 100 people on the street, “how do I lose weight?” Ninety-nine of them I know for sure are going to tell me that you need to exercise and you need to eat less calories. And it's not that that isn't true. I'm not willing to say at this point that that is not true. But I will say that we look at it in the wrong way. We look at it in a way that says yeah, we want a negative caloric balance. So, let's eat less, and let's move more. But we don't see what happens to that person in the future. A really good example of this, we're talking about like this metabolic testing stuff. They did a study on the biggest losers. I think it was the cohort of Biggest Losers there I want to say it was like 2010, they did the contest. This study was done in 2016, these people have already gained a significant amount of their weight back. And they did that same kind of test that I was doing, where they were measuring people's metabolic rates. And sure enough, six years after the contest, on average, these people had a metabolic rate that was like 600 calories lower than when they first started. It's really tough. And again, if you've ever done a diet, if you've ever done a workout program, have wondered why in five or six weeks, you feel terrible, you're hungry all the time you feel really cold, you're hangry, you're really short with people, and your cravings go through the roof. This is what you're telling your body to do. You're telling your body that there is a famine going on, and you're literally out running around looking for more food and yes, that's going to create some weight loss in the beginning until your body adjusts for that and it starts to shut down some of its main things that it needs to do. Your body's gonna say, okay, well, what do we really need to conserve? We need the brain; we need the organs so let's protect that. Let's store fat around the midsection. We don't need as much heat on the exterior of the body so your circulation can slow down. Your body temperature will literally drop and easy way to measure somebody's metabolism is just check their temperature, if they're chronically low, chances are their metabolic rate is going to be very low. And then, this period of shortage, once you finally get some food your body's like hoard, hoard, hoard, hoard. This is great, now we have food. So next time you put me through this we’ll have at least some energy in the form of fat. That's a byproduct of every diet and exercise program. 

Jack Heald  20:32 

So basically, what's happening when you reduce caloric intake and increase activity at the exact same time, and I realized there's some qualifications here, is that is the signal to our 3-million-year-old human biology there's a famine going on? 

Casey Ruff  20:53 

Yeah. As I said, financially this next year is going to be really rough. Would you go out and buy the Ferrari? Or would you start a savings account? The same kind of thing, if there's not a lot of calories available, the body thinks that okay, this is tough times. Humans are amazing it in during all kinds of different difficult things. And surely, we've endured generations and generations of famine, and feasting sessions and things like that. And so, you have the body's just thinks like, alright, well, we're in conserved mode, we're going to be in economical mode. And we're going to hold these things back. And so, the body just naturally starts burning less and less calories to keep people alive. And so, what is causing the weight loss initially is literally causing the weight gain, it's going to happen on the back end. When you see somebody who's really big and obese, those are the people that are trying the hardest. They're following the advice. They've probably done this multiple times, to their own detriment. It really sucks. 

Casey Ruff  21:52 

So, if we go back to that equation, and let's look at it again, and let's say yeah, we want to burn more calories than we consume. Why don't we flip it? Why don’t we look at the other side and say, like, okay, well, how do I teach my body to just burn more calories all the time, for me? Or maybe I can eat foods that just naturally like really make me very satiated. And it gets to be really hard to over consume those types of calories. And so, then we say like, okay, if I strength train, I'm gonna add muscle. Muscle is going to burn more calories all the time throughout the day anyway. If I eat fats and proteins, those are the foods that are so satiating, that literally take my interest away from food. And these things now have this like positive effect on metabolic rate, we can get people to burn more and more and more calories just sitting around being themselves. And that's the way you manipulate that formula in a way that's so much more maintainable. And the body will go through calories all the time. And once it does, that's when it starts finding the calories that you have already stored. All of that fat is free energy on the body, the body says, hey, wow, this has all been hidden for so long. It's right here. Let's get it out. Get out of here. I remember doing a test. This is when I was fully into the Keto world, but fasting was still like definitely going to kill you if you tried to fast. And people were starting to do fasting. And I remember one in particular, this guy came in, he should have had a metabolic rate of about 2000 calories. And he's been doing fasting for a few months at this point. And we measured his metabolic rate at rest, it should have been 2000, it was 2600 calories. He's literally burning 600 calories more than he should, for somebody his age, height, weight, and gender just sitting around. So, I said, wow, like, that's amazing. That's a lot of calories, you're clearly burning a lot of energy and a lot of fat. So, you need to eat 2600 calories. And he looked at me like it was absolutely nuts. He's like, what do you want me to eat? For 2600? I can't eat that many calories. Unless you want me to drink soda and eat Twinkies. Like there's no way I can do that. And that's what happened. His body gotten so used to burning off the stored body fat in a fasted state, he was burning tons of calories and didn't need to eat as much. And that's when people just got absolutely amazing results when he started to learn that and teach that to people. 

Jack Heald  24:01 

There's listeners, who are right now going, “oh, I get it. It's starting to make sense.”  

Dr. Philip Ovadia  24:15 

That's exactly it. This does start to make sense. And then you think about what we've been trying to do and of course, it doesn't make sense, because basically, our old model of dieting was based on the whole theory that our bodies are designed in such a way that we'd be able to starve to death essentially, starve ourselves to death and our bodies wouldn't fight against that. So of course, it ends up making a lot of sense. But myself and many others, I mean, I had a sort of kick myself when I heard that when I had that sort of aha moment and said why did I ever think the other way made sense, because when you explain it exactly like Casey just did, it really doesn't make sense that that would ever work. And we saw that it wasn't working. And yet we're so kind of surrounded by this way of thinking that we can't really see our way out of it. I want to get into what you now do with people, Casey, but first, I'd actually like to hear your results from this. You've been athletic your entire life, you've been competitive, you've been a personal trainer. But obviously you shifted the way that you eat as you've learned about these things. And for someone like yourself, who never really had a weight problem, didn't have to lose weight what results did you see when you made these changes? 

Casey Ruff  25:54 

It's a great question. It's interesting to talk to people about their own progression, seems like everybody kind of follows a flow like, okay, did standard American. That sucks, that didn't work. So, I found paleo and paleo maybe you like the keto, maybe led to a carnivore style diet. And so, at every stage, there was a bit of an improvement. I remember when I, like, all of a sudden, like fat was okay. It was like, well, I can put olive oil on a salad. And that tastes a little bit better. So that's, that's good. And then it was like really cutting out the carbohydrates, you started to realize how dependent you were on carbohydrates and food, like to think about going between clients without a snack was in thinkable or to do a bike ride where you weren't drinking ounces and ounces and ounces of sports drinks and gels like that was unfathomable. And so initially, I was just surprised by my energy and not needing to be tied up to food so much like you could just have two or three meals in a day. And if you focus on the fact, you'd be really full and like you just had energy to go do stuff like bikes ride were a lot easier. I haven't been competitive in over a decade, but I'm far faster on a bike now than I ever was before which I find really interesting. And then yeah, it was it was shortly after getting into the Keto space, and I was really feeling pigeon holed, like people were coming to me because they knew I was that guy. And I didn't want to be that guy. I want to be able to help everybody. And one of my business mentors said, like, no, you should really embrace it, like just own it, be that guy, people will come to you. And that's when I decided to kind of dedicate myself to keto and low carbohydrate diets. And that's when I was introduced to the carnivore diet, which was the Joe Rogan episode with Dr. Shaun Baker. I listened to the episode got about halfway through said this is absolutely preposterous. This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I turned it off. To this day, I haven't got back, I still need to go back and like listen to the second half of the episode, because I haven't listened. I just I thought it was absurd. And doing more research about it, I decided that in 2019, I want to transition over to carnivore diet. I want to, like a lot of people, let me try for 30 days, I'm pretty sure this won't kill me for 30 days, even though maybe I won't poop or maybe my cholesterol will go through the roof like I don't know. And it was April of 2019 that I decided to try a fully more strict carnivorous diet, and I enjoyed it so much that I just kind of forgot to get off of it. And I've been doing it ever since.  

Jack Heald  28:11 

What's "Forgot to get off it." I love it. 

Casey Ruff  28:19 

I just kind of forgot. And the biggest thing that I would say within a week or two, like I've always felt like I've been a pretty positive and upbeat person, but my optimism and positivity went way up. My gratitude, my spirituality went way up. And my ability to deal with stress was completely different. I couldn't believe that you could be so sharp and focused, just eating meat and eating it not very many times a day, like it was very soon after it transitioned over to a carnivore diet that I was eating once or twice a day. And all of a sudden, you just know you have like more time you've got more energy. And so, you got more out of like going on a walk and like seeing the life around you and all the birds and the plants and just appreciating everything so much more. It really was a change in my brain. It completely shifted. That was the biggest surprising-- 

Jack Heald  29:10 

That's a shift from eating a traditional keto diet to a carnivore diet, that's when the shift occurred? 

Casey Ruff  29:19 

That's when that shift occurred when I took all plant foods out of my diet for good. That's when I had that shift. 

Jack Heald  29:31 

I'd love to explore that.  

Dr. Philip Ovadia  29:36 

It's something that we hear fairly consistently. I experienced some other changes as well going from very low carb keto to carnivore and there certainly something there as crazy as the carnivore diet sounds, and I had that same exact reaction when I heard Sean on Joe Rogan and thankfully like you, I said, well, 30 days probably isn't going to kill me. And I would kind of say the similar thing, here I am three and a half years later and just never really occurred to me, I kind of forgot to go back. So that's a good way of putting it. So, talk a little bit about how you work with clients today, what kind of things you do, what kind of programs you take them through, typically now? 

Casey Ruff  30:27 

Sure, yeah. So, our careers at the gym that we were at ended in 2020, with pandemic. Pandemic happened, and we got shut down, obviously, like everybody else. And we just kind of noticed that the habits that our clients had were really transitioning in that time. Our gym opened back up. And it was a few months or something like that the gym opened back up and tried to get the trainers to come back. But for us, more than anything, it was really a financial thing. Like, as personal trainers, like we said before, we're 100% Commission. And so, if we don't have people that we're getting in front of, and our current clients that we're always training, we don't make any money. And so, when a lot of our clients change their habits, they decided, like, for this period of time, like, rather than go to the gym, which is closed, maybe they can dust off some of the weights they have in the basement. And they enjoyed that a little bit more. They didn't like commuting to the gym. They worked out outside and started doing those things. And it was pretty early on that we kind of saw that landscape was changing. And so, we always loved having a career in a gym. But since that changed, we decided to open up our own company which is balanced body. And we work with a lot of the same people that we have already worked with, which is great, we will train them in their homes. We ended up finishing our basement into our private facility, a private gym, and a Pilates studio. So, we both do that. My wife does more of the Pilates side of things. And she also works with a form of tissue release called the Rossiter system, which can really help people get out of pain. And my side of things is more on the nutrition and more on the personal training side as well. And so, it's kind of a cool team. We both get to work closer to home and around the neighborhood. And we also do a lot of virtual events. So, we've taken on new clients from all over the country. We work with them both on nutrition and personal training. We have to be just really creative about how we do that. But we found that with a pretty minimal amount of equipment and an internet connection, you can accomplish a lot, you can see people's farm and you can help them get healthy and you can talk to them about their nutritional habits. And we just continued doing that. And along with that came a little bit more time and space. And that's when we started the podcasts and all of that. So, it's been an interesting transition and we're definitely building the plane as we're flying it. But yeah, we do work with people. We do work with people one on one or virtually all over the country or all over the world, really.  

Jack Heald  32:51 

So, what are the most common? Go ahead, Phil... 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  32:55 

I was just gonna ask I know you're dying to hear about the Rossiter system, the Rossiter technique, it was something that was unfamiliar to me, quite honestly. So, we'd love to hear a little bit more about what's the theory behind this? 

Casey Ruff  33:11 

Sure, it's really challenging to describe because it sounds so different. And so right off the bat, I'll ask somebody if they're familiar with Rolfing. Rolfing is a kind of tissue release and if you're familiar with that, it's very similar to that. And so, what it is, it is an assisted kind of a stretch, where my wife Bethany will place, she's actually stands on you. So, she'll place part of her foot on a certain part of your body to kind of pin it down. And then you will have to move through a series of stretches on your own that helped create more space in the body. And so, it's really common that somebody will come in and their foot has been hurting them for several years, their hips have been hurting them for several years. She sees a lot of people with knee pain, and shoulder pain. Shoulder pain is a really good example. The tissue, the myofascial tissue in your body, if you want to think of it, it's almost like the white membrane around an orange that kind of contains the white part, it's a deck goes through your entire body. And it's the way that like, literally, your tongue has a connection with your toes. It runs all across your body and everything is connected in that way. We like to isolate these muscles, the bicep, these are the triceps, but that's not the way your body thinks of things and that's not the way the body works. And so oftentimes people come in and see Bethany, and she'll watch them. She’ll watch them move and say, yeah, okay, you've got left hip pain, and let's go work on your right shoulder. And people say like, what are you talking about? I just told you my pain was here, and she releases some area in the shoulders that creates more space down the chain for something else and help get people out of pain. So that's basically what it is. And it's quite remarkable to watch. I see people that have worked with all kinds of chiropractors and physical therapists and have tried everything—scraping, more Rolfing, massage, all this stuff they tried forever, and it hasn't really worked and within a few sessions, generally speaking, Bethany can get people out of tremendous amounts of pain pretty quickly. It's very effective.  

Jack Heald  35:05 

That's very cool. My wife was a practicing massage therapist for 30 years and has added a whole bunch of modalities over that time. So that kind of release, I'm familiar with it, but I've never heard of the Rossiter system. So that's pretty unique. You actually need a skilled practitioner to work you through that, is that right? 

Casey Ruff  35:28 

Yeah. It's named after Richard Rossiter, who's the person that came up with it, but he has certified people all over the country, and you can search, I think, it's through Rossiter stretching. You can Google that. And you can search to see if there's a practitioner in your area. But I love that approach, like your wife, like using different modalities, different tools in the toolbox. I think it's wonderful. That's great. 

Jack Heald  35:47 

So, I wanted to ask you, what's the worst health advice that your clients routinely follow? And the best health advice that your clients routinely ignore? 

Casey Ruff  36:02 

That's a great question. Wow. I think the worst advice that people get is that they're going to be healthy by reducing their calories, and they're going to get healthy by increasing the amounts of plant foods in their diet, specifically, vegetables. Everybody just knows you have to have a tremendous amount of vegetables in your diet, or you are going to die. And I'm really not against all plant foods. I don't think all are problematic. I think really benign ones would be things like white rice, or fruit, sometimes a year for some people, but the more and more I've gotten into carnivore, the less value I see in vegetables. I don't think they do a whole lot of good for anybody. And I think they can potentially cause quite a bit of harm.  

Jack Heald  36:49 

And this is why people pay the money to hear this podcast. That kind of stuff right there. That's fire. There's your pull quote, Phil. Oh, my God. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. But I hear stuff like that, I get excited. 

Casey Ruff  37:03 

You should. It's great. Most people don't like them. They taste bitter. They struggled to get them. I was just on a walk around the lake. And I was just thinking to myself it's springtime here in Salt Lake City. It's absolutely beautiful. Think plants are everywhere. They're growing all around the lake, all kinds of different ones. And I was just thinking like, I'm on a natural landscape. Let's say I'm on a plant-based diet, but I didn't have the store to go to. What if I just had to live on the plants growing around my neighborhood? I would starve to death, there's nothing to eat. You don't just see plants giving you all of their food 365 days out of the year, it just doesn't happen. If they do, it's extremely seasonal. You definitely just don't see like random vegetables growing around all over the place. There are certain trees in my neighborhood that sometimes like a few months from now, when like August or September, they'll have some fruit and maybe a peach will drop in and land on the ground. And I'll eat and it'd be really delicious and like the best fruit I've ever had. I noticed as soon as I do that, I'll get really hungry, and I'll need to eat again and again and again. So, I've learned to kind of avoid that a little bit. But that's a really special time of the year. That's not all year, that's not 365 days out of the year that we get spontaneous food just growing from these plants. And so again, I don't think that eating plants is necessarily a bad thing. I just think we take it for granted that you can walk into a grocery store, buy a softball sized apple 365 days out of year, that's not natural. And I wish people would ask two questions. I wish people would ask, not only where did this apple come from, but I wish they would ask when did this apple get picked. When did this come from? And it's a reason why people in the industry called them birthday apples. Most apples that you find in a store are over a year by the time you buy them. And so, it's just--yeah, yeah, they've got to come from somewhere. They have to be stored somewhere. They have to be transported. They have to be farmed. You can look at the ethics of how they treat the farm employees. You can look at the carbon emissions... 

Jack Heald  39:05 

I knew they came from far away, but a year old? 

Casey Ruff  39:11 

That's how they have to do it. 

Jack Heald  39:12 

I've never heard anything like that before that just... I'm not questioning the validity of what you're saying. I'm just saying... 

Casey Ruff  39:22 

It's crazy. I know. And again, that's an apple. That's a really great thing for somebody to eat. I would way rather have somebody have that softball size apple than anything you find in the middle of the store, which is an absolute disaster. I mean, that stuff is just total garbage. Don't put any of that in your body. Go eat some apples, but really question like, how good really was this for the planet? What was killed to make this farmland? What was killed in the year of the harvest, which is incredibly destructive and destructive for the planet versus some of this other food, to answer the second part of your question, what are the things that cause the least amount of damage that are allowed to live a life that while they live that life, they're actually building topsoil and building the planet? And you look at ruminant animals, these animals are allowed to eat grass, which we cannot do. They can. They can ferment that down and produce a really high-quality protein and fat. And if I have one cow, that's probably food for an entire life. I can wait till it’s at the very end of its lifecycle where it's been walking around and pooping everywhere, laying fertilizer down, helping the plants grow better, sequestering carbon, and that's one life that needs to be taken versus the absolute disaster that is agriculture that kills thousands and thousands and thousands of animals all the time. So that would be my answer. I think that the worst advice that somebody could get is to have a high amount of plant matter in their diet. And the best advice that people think, I'm absolutely gonna grow a second head out of my shoulders, is that the healthiest food you could eat is salty, fatty meat. Grab a ribeye. Grab some grown beef, you could do this for a few bucks a day. Grab a bunch of eggs, like it's really quite easy. The things that you've been told are the worst for you, or actually the very best for you. 

Jack Heald  41:09 

You're my hero. Eat more steak 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  41:11 

I was actually at the grocery store. Eat more steak. Yes, indeed. So, I was I was at the grocery store earlier today, which is a place that I'm not really at all that often, to be honest. And I was in the produce section, and I came across these tomatoes. And then the package—the name on the package for these tomatoes was Sugar Bombs. And it just kind of struck me first of all we finally have a little bit of truth in advertising because you go around to other parts of the supermarket and you see something called just eggs, which are actually not eggs at all. They're one of these fake plant products. But anyway, so it said Sugar Bombs. And then it struck me how, what a place we've gotten into as a society that in order to sell this fruit, or tomatoes, I guess vegetable fruit, I know, there's some debate on that, but in order to sell this food that is supposed to be so healthy for you that we're told absolutely essential to have as part of a healthy diet. They need to equate it to sugar to make people want to buy. And that's where we are as a society.  

Casey Ruff  42:26 

It's yeah. It's interesting. Once you step out of the paradigm and start looking back in that you realize, like, wow, we really did a number on ourselves. I mean, me too. This morning, I drove by a store and driving by that store required me to drive by the soda shop. This this soda shop sells soda with additional flavorings that you can buy and sugar cookies. This is 11 in the morning, and the line is wrapping around the building on three sides of the building. I counted 11 cars. What are we doing? What are we doing? This is not working. Walk through an airport or mall and look around and see how are we doing as a society, we're not doing that great. People are really sick. And they're trying their hardest. And they're doing what we're telling them to do is people in the health world and count your calories and go run all the time and all this stuff, and it just doesn't work. And it's really, really sad. And we just turn around and say like, oh, well sucks for you that you're fat, I guess you weren't very good at following the advice. So that’s Jason Fung kind of stuff, it's blaming the victim, it's horrible. And if people could just step out for a second and just see that they were being lied to. And a lot of people are making a lot of money on their lifestyle choices and will continue to do so because we've gotten really good at keeping people alive and sick for a long time. And that makes people a lot of money 

Jack Heald  43:48 

It makes people a lot of money people - alive and sick. 

Casey Ruff  43:50 

If I can get you on insulin at age 30 and keep you alive until age 80, that's fantastic. I'm selling insulin. It’s horrible.  

Dr. Philip Ovadia  43:59 

Yeah, certainly something we've talked a lot about on the show just how the whole healthcare industry has turned into a sick care industry. And the healthcare industry is not there to keep you healthy. And as you were talking about earlier, the fitness industry really isn't there to make you fit. 

Casey Ruff  44:21 

It's right. It's designed to make people like me sell a lot of programs and meal plans, and have you come back every January for more because that's when you're really motivated. And you thought, oh, those first few weeks, I did great. Let me go back and spend another grand with this guy, he can load me up on a bunch of supplements and all this crap and it's just garbage. Yeah, you don't need any of that. 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  44:41 

I was just gonna say one of the other topics we've kind of talked about a lot is the thinking around exercise and again, the traditional model that we're... I shouldn't say the traditional but the recent model that we've been sold is you got to spend your hour or two in the gym every day. You got to be doing your cardio. And that's the only way to remain healthy. What is your kind of approach to exercise? What do you advise people to prioritize when they are exercising? 

Casey Ruff  45:18 

Yeah, great question. Okay, so I did it today. The poor girl at the front desk of our little community center that has a gym and has some weight equipment just thinks I'm nuts because I'll walk in to the gym, disappear in the weight room, and then 15 minutes later, I'll walk out of there and say, CLC in three or four days. And she's like, well, you just got her like, what did you do you look like you look terrible walking out. First of all, whatever you did in there, you did a number on yourself. And the protocol that I really liked to do with people is definitely strength training. So, we'd love to train people safely. Strength training, in my mind, for most of my career was let's do what we call functional training. So, I like to play ice hockey. So, I go and play ice hockey every week, and that's on the ice with my buds, we're talking smack all morning. And it's every Wednesday morning, whatever. So, I'm going to go to the gym, and I'm going to mimic all the things that kinda sort of look like ice hockey in the gym. And think that that's going to improve my ice hockey. And I don't really believe that anymore because none of that is in the context of ice hockey. I need to be on the ice with my skates with my buds talking smack to be able to train that context. And so, I use the gym is something as a place where I can develop strength and bone density and strong connective tissue. And we do that with a protocol that's outlined in the book Body by Science by Dr. Doug McGuff where he does basically a one set to failure on a few different lifts, not many, maybe 5, 6, 7 different machines, but you're moving at an extremely slow pace. So, think about sitting down and like a chest patch machine, but you're moving this weight incredibly slowly. Maybe 10 seconds out, 10 seconds back. There's no risk of injury. But one of the big misconceptions in the fitness world is that slow twitch muscles fire slowly, and fast twitch muscle fibers fire quickly, so you can't train the same, you can't train fast twitch muscle fibers by moving slow. And that's a misconception. It's the it's the rate of fatigue of the muscle fibers. So, slow twitch muscle fibers fatigue slowly, but then recover quickly. Fast twitch muscle fibers fatigue quickly, but then recover very slowly. But that means you can train those muscle fibers at a very slow tempo. And if you're doing this kind of a weight over and over until you cannot move that weight any further, you can maybe get a little shaky, it's almost like you're taking yourself right to the edge of the weight that you can lift, you are systematically going through and training all of the different muscle fibers to create a response that tells your body that you and your current iteration is not strong enough. Whatever you are pushing against, your body doesn't care. But it does care that it has to do it. So, if you go into a gym and you lift a weight, and it's three sets to 12, and you're able to do it and you set the weights down, you leave, your body just says, well, great, like that's cool, we were already able to do that so we don't need to build more muscle. That takes energy. It's very difficult for the body. But if you push yourself with tea, your body says, whoa, okay, that was really intense. We got to be stronger. That's all we know, we had to push his weight. We weren't able to. So, let's build more muscle. Let's build more bone density. Let's make sure that connective tissue is very strong. And when you're lifting in that way, the frequency is that which you need to do that - it reduces. You don't need to do that very frequently. So, my lifting routine takes about 15-20 minutes. I do it twice a week. And that's all I do. Besides that, I really recommend that people do things that they enjoy and start to explore those things. Do you like to ride a bike? Do you like to paddleboard? Do you like to go on walks I think is the most beneficial thing that people can do and I try to get them moving at a low level, which when we did all that metabolic testing, we learned that the lower heart rates were where people were burning fat as their fuel source, not just burning tons of calories, and definitely not just burning their calories from carbohydrates. So, we really steer people away from doing intense cardio especially and we steer to people more towards doing safe and effective strength training and then spend the rest of their time outside in nature doing the things they love and just call it movement and that has gotten tremendous results. 

Jack Heald  49:24 

That's really interesting. It's a twist on a lot of the stuff I've heard. That's really fascinating. 

Casey Ruff  49:38 

It's shocking. The amount that you need to be really effective with somebody and get them to lose a lot of weight in the form of fat is like a few workouts a week and it's changing their diet to a few of the things we talked about and people - they just know they lose pounds and pounds of fat every single week. It's crazy. 

Jack Heald  49:57 

Okay, so this is a question I've wanted to ask before you started on that, and now that you've walked through all that, I really want to ask this question. What are the most common objections you get from people? People have to hiring a coach? And how do you address that? 

Casey Ruff  50:17 

That's another really great question. It's really unfortunate, because I was talking to one of our podcast guests about this last week where people... The equipment that you need seems like really sexy, and everybody's chasing some different like, apparatus, or different machine or different way of doing things or ThighMaster or HealthRider, whatever the things we've all purchased in the past. But people are more willing to pay for some $4,000 mirror that you can work out from, but they're less willing to pay a certified coach to take them through some really fundamental lifts for like, a few weeks, and it's far less expensive. And that fitness professional, if they're worth their weight, should be able to teach the person how to continue doing that for the rest of their life. It's like teaching somebody how to cook, they're teaching a skill. And once you know, you can do it for the rest of your life. And so, I do wish more people would consider hiring a coach just to learn some of these principles. When I'm in a session with somebody, I'm counting the reps, arguably poorly. Most of my clients say I'm giving them the exact program that I think is going to be best for them. And we're doing movement screenings to find out what muscles need to get stronger, which ones are already too strong, need to be strengthened, need to be stretched, whatever. We put all these programs together and they're really important. And we want to teach people those skills that they can use for the rest of their lives. But we're also workshopping things as we go. So not only are they talking about what they did with their family this weekend, we're talking, how was your food? What foods Did you really love? What do you think this week is going to be? And we're always just kind of working on strategies. And I think if most people kind of lost the, I don't know, preconceived notion that the trainer is going to be like cracking the whip and yelling at them for an hour and doing these awful workouts that people hate, it's more like no, we're going to do the right workout, it's going to get you really good results. We're gonna give you the minimum effective dosage, we're going to help talk to you about some of these other things, stress and sleep and proper footwear and walking mechanics and all these other things that again, are building a skill that you can carry on for the rest of your life. I wish more people would try it out. But again, I think more people don't because, honestly, I think it's probably easier for people to spend lots of money on some sexy new program or piece of equipment or diet program, rather than just accepting that this might not be easy, but it's simple. If I can just stick to the simple principles. I don't have any more excuses. I'm gonna see really good results. And so yeah, some people are just I don't know, I don't think a lot of people are willing to do that. That's okay. 

Jack Heald  52:46 

Casey, you are a really articulate advocate for this new way of thinking about fitness and weight loss. I would love to keep this conversation going. But I'm aware you've got a hard stop at the top of the hour. So, I just want to say thanks for being here. This has been... I'm surprised at how engaging this topic is. I thought I knew stuff and I don't. So, thank you. How do folks get a hold of you, want to learn more about what you do, and maybe engage you to be their coach? 

Casey Ruff  53:25 

Sure. Absolutely. Well, thank you very much. And like I said at the beginning of the show, it is such a high honor to be hosted on the show and get to talk with both of you. What have you called yourself in the past, the talking hairpiece?  

Jack Heald  53:36 

I’m the talking hairdo. 

Casey Ruff  53:38 

Absolutely love it. You are an absolute wordsmith when crafting your questions. Yeah, so anyway, people can find us on our website is usually the easiest place so that is myboundlessbody.com. On the page it right on the very first part, there's a “Book now” button that anybody listening can click on and that's to book a free 30-minute consultation with us where we can talk about anything. We were more than happy to have conversations with people if they have more questions about diet or strength training or anything random about sleep or stress or anything else we're more than willing to do that. People can also sign up for a complimentary movement screen which we do virtually. So, we take people through a systemized kind of movement screening that makes them do seven different movements and three different clearing screens so we can point out like hey, this is why you might be having pain in your lower back or here's some things we need to address because your quads are to tighten your glutes are really weak and it just helps people understand what they can be doing that can really help them in the gym so all that is complimentary. We offer that for free on the website which again is myboundlessbody.com They can also find our podcast there as well which is been Balanced Body Radio. Our episode with Philip is dropping soon. We're looking forward to that. We had a really great conversation a few weeks ago, so that'd be exciting. 

Jack Heald  54:44 

Pretty good. Phil, anything else you want to ask before we wind this up for the day? 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  54:51 

Now just want to thank Casey for everything he's doing in the space and it's always great to hear these different perspectives and the different backgrounds that so many of us come from, and yet we arrive kind of at the same place and come to the same conclusion. So, yeah, another great conversation. Really enjoyed it. And I look forward to talking with you more, Casey. 

Casey Ruff  55:17 

Thank you very much. It's such an honor. 

Jack Heald  55:19 

All right. Well, for Casey Ruff of My Boundless Body and Philip Ovadia of Ovadia Heart Health. I'm Jack Heald. Go ahead and mash that subscribe button. This podcast we drop a new episode every Tuesday. If you missed any of the recent ones, you are seriously missing out. We've had some fantastic guests and fantastic shows. I would also recommend that you follow Dr. Ovadia on Twitter @ifixhearts and then go to his website ifixhearts.co and take the metabolic health quiz that will give you a real good idea of where you are metabolically which is what it's all about. And finally, you can learn more about Dr. Ovadia at ovadiahearthealth.com Until next time, this is the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast