Arthur: Well thank you everybody for joining us today it’s great to have

everybody on the call. It has been a lot of fun interacting with you

and with the professionals that we’ve been able to meet and

providing value and giving you tools to achieve your goals here.

And we have a very special guest today, but before I introduce him

and before I kind of give a background him I just want to make sure

he is still on the call: Dr. Ben are you there?

Dr. Ben: I am here.

Arthur: Excellent. So let me give you a bit of background why are we

talking to this person and what we hope to accomplish on this call.

And just by way background, Dr. Ben obtained his undergrad

degree in Electrical Engineering at M.I.T. followed by his MD from

Columbia University college of Physicians and Surgeons in New

York City.

And you know as I was looking at his bio, I had met him before I

really understood his background. I was really kind of floored that

he would be willing to take some time with us. What’s interesting

is his experience really ties him well to what we are trying to

accomplish and that is he had a lot of experience in Family Practice.

Really spent some time practicing with a group of doctors in Burke

Family Wellness Care in Chicago, and since then he’s really

focused on Wellness, also on the entrepreneurial side just life

coaching and just combining his intuitive medical wisdom with life

and business coaching strategies is what attracted me to having a

dialogue today and bringing some of the insights that he has to bear

on what we are trying to accomplish and so Dr. Ben, I just

appreciate you taking time to be with us today.

Dr. Ben: Well, it is my privilege to be here as well. Thank you.

Arthur: So, you know, I think that we are going to have a lot of fun and I

think we are going to end up with a lot of good dialogue. So let us

just dive right into it so that the clock doesn’t become our enemy.

Dr. Ben: OK, sounds good.

Arthur: So you know, most of us want a magic box when it comes to weight

loss, getting in shape, we kind of want a simple checklist; if we

follow this, we get the results we want. But is that really realistic?

Can we just set up a system so to speak and then just kind of watch

it eat away at our fat without really doing anything else after that?

Dr. Ben: Let me go big picture for a second then we talk about this.

Arthur: OK.

Dr. Ben: But there was a great talk by Bruce Lipton who wrote The Biology

of Belief recently and he talked about how main stream medicine, a

lot of our western approach to science and medicine, has been based

very much on a Newtonian view of the world. Very mechanistic

view of the world: what you see is what you get. And if you do this

you get this result. You just count calories and stuff that is all you

need to figure. And then what we start to realize is quantum physics

and some of the ideas of quantum physics have started to spread

too, how does that impact our view of the world?

It starts to give us a whole another understanding that there is other

variables especially when you are dealing with human beings and I

think we all realize that at an intuitive level that you've got factor in

the person as well and their own belief and emotional make up and

stuff as well. So you just give someone a recipe, some people will

be able to just take the recipe and do it and get results and do great.

But some people, you have got to take into account the actual

person you are dealing with.

So I would say in that kind of scenario, just understanding and I like

the contrast of moving beyond just a Newtonian mechanistic view

of the world to a more quantum view where we actually start to

realize, thoughts and beliefs and attitudes and energy and emotional

makeup actually can impact our actual choices and results in this

physical world and when we take both into account, we can get

much more complete results.

Arthur: I love the background you gave and I love reading. I think I need to

go do some read ups. And what was the name of Bruce Liptons

book?

Dr. Ben: The Biology of Belief.

Arthur: Biology of Belief.

Dr. Ben: He may have written more as well. That is one of the most well

known books and then I just saw a talk that he gave not too long

ago, it was actually on the internet, and he mentioned this kind of

spectrum of approaching where we are today and understanding

how our bodies work.

Arthur: So, you know, we’ve been talking as a group about how our number

one fat burning organ is our brain just because of the power it has

over every action and choice. Can you go a little bit deeper about

how our beliefs and expectations play in to our level of wellness

and more specifically like our fitness?

Dr. Benny: That is a great way of putting it. The greatest fat organ, burning

organ is our brain, that’s excellent. Some people may be familiar

with and maybe some this will be new for, but there is a movie that

came out a few years ago that for some may have been somewhat

controversial but it stimulated a lot of discussions, a lot of questions

for people. And it was called ' What the Bleep Do We Know?'

And there might even be things on the internet and through Amazon

now, I think there is some follow up I had done on that. But one of

the interesting things that that movie did is it raised the question or

the awareness that moving beyond just looking at things

mechanistically, just looking at the physical realm and how that’s

affecting things and start to realize that our thoughts and emotions,

seeing the connection with our brain and the neurotransmitters and

hormones that our brain releases and how that affects ourselves and

understanding how even ourselves can change their receptors to

being more responsive to certain signals and other signals

[unintelligible].

And this is all pretty much well known but it went a little further to

kind of theorize that if someone had certain patterns of beliefs and

even emotions day after day after day for many years, your cells

could almost in a sense become addicted to those patterns and

become less responsive to nutrition and other things that ideally you

would like them to become responsive to.

And so the interesting idea to really kind of link both kind of

peoples’ spiritual and faith backgrounds was actually a physical

explanation of how our thoughts and the patterns of thinking and

beliefs can actually have an actual physical effect in terms that

western medicine and western science can understand and can talk

about, and that it could actually affect how your cells respond and

obviously have an impact on your metabolism, how your cells

respond to your nutrition, or changes in nutrition and exercise and

various factors like that.

Arthur: That’s deep. You know it is amazing how some things that we

know by experience but we really do not understand the scientific

reason for it. To say that our cells can actually, what do you say?

They change the way they receive their receptors chain

[unintelligible]

Dr. Ben: Yeah, we do know that cells can change their receptor sites and the

receptors are what are necessary for hormones or different

neurotransmitters and signals to actually trigger something in a cell.

And the cells can actually change which receptors they are actually

displaying on their cell wall and we know in different conditions

like in pregnancy and then when someone goes into labour, the cells

are changing their receptors so they are responsive to different

hormones that are appropriate for that time.

Well, the speculation was that, what if, because our brain releases

chemicals as well, what if someone has such locked in patterns of

beliefs, and emotional habits in ways of talking themselves that

their cells could actually have receptors tuned into that so much so

that they could eventually even become not having any room for

receptors that actually respond to good nutrition an nutrients they

want to take in. Now some of this is a little bit of speculation but I

think we all can see, if you think of it as spectrum, we all have

probably experienced this to some extent. When we think about it

we realize, wow, my daily patterns actually affect how I feel.

Arthur: You know what, as you were talking that I was thinking about an

experience, not related to weight loss that I had the other

We’ve only been down in Florida for a short period of time relative

to where we have lived--other places. And I still haven’t quite got

used to the fact that there are a lot of big bugs that tend to make

their way into the homes

Dr. Ben: Oh, yeah.

Arthur: And I was in the bedroom really like ready to go to bed and I look

up above the ceiling and there is this bug it must have been an inch-

and-a-half long and an half an inch thick, and I am like; you know

normally I am not very -- I am okay with things and actually wasn’t

that disturbed – but when I went out u to grab it and it kind of

crawled, flew away, it galled me and there was no physical contact

with me yet.

Dr. Ben: Yeah

Arthur: I just thought; what kind of chemicals were released in my brain

and what did that do to those cells? And I could think; if you have

some type of mental or emotional response to something it’s

definitely releasing stuff into your system and affecting the

biological, physiological process.

Dr. Ben: Absolutely, and we do know that. It’s risen your neurotransmitters,

of course everybody is familiar with adrenaline and so on it can

have a whole cascade effect. Now, not to be overwhelmed, some

people are overwhelmed, the amazing thing is our body is so

wonderfully tuned to be able to balance itself in response. So the

key of our discussion here and for everybody listening is all we

want to do is be a little more aware of this process so we can start

just steering it in a healthy direction.

Arthur: So, speaking of a healthy direction, I went through what you call

your seven day e-course and I’ve been following you on your blog

for a while since we met and you talk about something that I think

is significant: The life affirming steps?

Dr. Ben: Yes

Arthur: What do you mean by that? How can that impact us when we are

trying to reach some fitness goals?

Dr. Ben: You know one of the unique things about having a life partner and

being married is often as you read things you get to dialogue back

and forth and I can't remember if it was my wife or myself that--

and I think it was kind of in dialogue with her -- we were reading

some of the works of Luis Hay who has a great book called ' You

Can Heal Your Life' to kind of open up this idea of the mind body

connection for people.