This document summarizes a discussion between Arthur and Dr. Ben about achieving fitness goals. Dr. Ben provides background on his education and experience in family practice and wellness. He discusses moving beyond a purely mechanical view of health and the role of beliefs, emotions, and quantum physics in impacting physical health. Dr. Ben explains how our thoughts can affect our cells and metabolism through chemical releases in the brain. He suggests our number one fat burning organ is the brain and that positive life affirming steps can impact our ability to reach fitness goals.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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?'

7. 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

8. 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]

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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.