Blinkist Summary Book

2021-10-21 06:39:45 You're Invited
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ealth – being socially isolated has the same health risks as smoking a pack of cigarettes every day. 
Successful companies community movements and activist protests all have something in common: they give people the chance to connect with others. They also give them the opportunity to be part of something bigger than themselves. By creating these engaged trust-filled communities people and organizations can have real and lasting influence.
Building trust quickly is essential to creating community.
Who do you trust the most in life? Is it your best friend since childhood? Or perhaps your family doctor? 
Humans are wired to build trusting relationships with other people. After all it’s how we’ve survived for so long. But trusting other people can also make us vulnerable to getting hurt. So we’ve developed handy screening mechanisms and biases to make it easier to know who to trust – and who to avoid. 
For example we routinely put our trust in experts like plumbers or doctors. Th Open / Comment

2021-10-21 06:39:45 You're Invited
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gredient in any successful business or social movement. 
Jean decided to break the silence. She invited a group of women to her home to discuss their experiences with weight loss and dieting. The women were thrilled to finally have the chance to talk openly and get support. In fact the event was so successful that more and more people started coming each week. And people who had struggled for years were finally able to lose weight. That group became a little multimillion-dollar business called Weight Watchers. 
Why was it so successful? Because it tapped into our deep need for connection. Humans evolved in tribes; we’ve always needed each other for survival. But today many people feel isolated and alienated which has terrible effects on their well-being. In fact research by social psychologist Matt Lieberman and his team has shown that social isolation lights up the same areas of the brain that react to physical pain. What’s more loneliness has serious consequences for our physical h Open / Comment

2021-10-21 06:39:44 You're Invited
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people value IKEA furniture so much;
how to build trust among strangers quickly; and
why understanding behavioral psychology can help you become a better leader.
Human connection is the key ingredient in any successful business or social movement.
Have you ever desperately wanted to change your behavior . . . but just couldn’t get yourself to do it? That’s what happened to Jean Nidetech a woman desperate to lose weight. She knew she should change her diet and exercise habits. But she didn’t know how to make herself commit. 
Whenever she went to the doctor he’d just give her a new diet plan. Full of motivation she’d stick to the diet religiously for a few weeks or months. But eventually she’d get tired revert to her old eating patterns and gain back all the weight she’d lost. Jean’s breakthrough came when she realized that thousands of women around her were having the same problems – they just weren’t talking about it. 
The key message here is: Human connection is the key in Open / Comment

2021-10-21 06:39:44 You're Invited
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What’s in it for me? Learn how to make authentic connections and build community.
By the time he’d reached his late twenties John Levy was struggling. His start-up had failed and he was grappling with the turmoil of the financial crash of 2008. He knew he wanted to make a difference in the world but he just didn’t know how. 
So he hosted a dinner party and invited 12 strangers to cook for him. From those humble beginnings the Influencers Dinner was born – a network that now comprises thousands of people including Nobel laureates Olympic champions and award-winning musicians. Why would any of these people want to cook food for Levy? Because he’d discovered that what people crave the most is connection and community – and he designed the events to maximize both. 
These blinks will reveal how you too can become a behavioral designer. They’ll show exactly how to create events that’ll strengthen your community and allow for authentic connection. 
In these blinks you’ll learn
why Open / Comment

2021-10-21 06:39:43 You're Invited
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You’re Invited (2021) is your guide to creating connections and building communities around what personally matters most. It reveals the key things you need to know about behavioral psychology in order to design events that best fit your business and values – Open / Comment

2021-10-20 06:40:00 Hooked
Part of 17/17

come to rely on the convenience of ready-to-eat foods but the disturbing truth is that these meals are a poor fit for our digestive systems. They’re making us and our children gain weight.
Actionable advice:
Take the fun out of junk food.
Fast foods are made to manipulate our tastes but there are some simple ways you can resist their allure. If you must have junk foods in your house try taking them out of their fun colorful packaging. You could put Oreo cookies into a cookie jar for instance. Putting processed foods in plain packaging will make your brain less excited every time you catch a glimpse of them in your kitchen cupboard.
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We’d love to hear what you think about our content! Just drop an email to [email Open / Comment

2021-10-20 06:39:59 Hooked
Part of 16/17

re starting to understand.
Specifically the problem may be that your digestive system cannot calculate how many calories there are in highly-processed foods. This might not sound like a big deal but it is. Whenever you eat a meal your stomach can accurately judge how many calories the meal contains. Your body then uses this information to decide how many to store as fat and how many to burn off through your metabolism. So if your body can’t calculate how many calories are in a meal then your metabolism can’t function properly and too many calories are stored as fat.
So even though the processed food industry has cut the number of calories in its products those products may still cause people to gain weight.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks:
Processed food gets us hooked in lots of different ways. From childhood memories of enjoying junk to the sheer variety of sugar-packed products it can be almost impossible for some people to make healthy choices. Families have Open / Comment

2021-10-20 06:39:59 Hooked
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hese manufacturers went from selling 60.4 trillion calories a year to 54 trillion. But does lowering calories really reduce weight gain? Perhaps not.
This is the key message: Cutting calories in processed foods might not solve the problem.
In fact evidence is now emerging that the relationship between processed food and weight gain is extremely complex. In 2019 a study published in the Journal of Cell Metabolism suggested that it's not just the high calorie count in processed foods that causes us to gain weight but something else too. The study’s researchers discovered this by giving 20 participants a highly-processed diet for 14 days and then swapping them over to an unprocessed diet for the same amount of time. Importantly the two diets contained the same amount of fat sugar salt and calories. But even so the participants still gained weight on the highly-processed diet.
The researchers couldn’t say why the processed food diet had caused weight gain but some scientists think they' Open / Comment

2021-10-20 06:39:55 Hooked
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point at which a product becomes so sugary and our brains get so excited by eating it that our stop system is disabled. When this happens we mindlessly eat and eat and eat.
Cutting calories in processed foods might not solve the problem.
In 2015 the processed food industry faced a formidable critic. Michelle Obama the former first lady of the United States publicly accused fast food of causing America’s childhood obesity crisis. She asked the industry to alter its products to make them healthier and less damaging. The industry’s response was to make some changes but the question remains: did it change enough?
Even before the former first lady’s intervention processed food makers were trying to tweak their products and their unhealthy public image. Major food manufacturers like PepsiCo Kelloggs and Coca-Cola formed a group called the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation and agreed to cut 1.5 trillion calories from their products. These weren’t empty words. Between 2007 and 2012 t Open / Comment

2021-10-20 06:39:55 Hooked
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there was a catch. When busy American families tucked into their conveniently microwaved pizzas or enchiladas or pot pies they didn’t know exactly what ingredients their new food contained.
If they’d known they might have been more cautious. Because instead of just adding sugar to things we expect to be sweet like cereal and candy the processed food industry also started adding it to everything else. In fact food makers put sugar in three-quarters of the products in the grocery store from bread to yogurt to pasta sauces.
The reason they did this was simple: the sweeter something is the harder it is to stop eating. That’s because our appetite is controlled by two distinct parts of our brains which some neuroscientists call the go brain and the stop brain. The go brain encourages us to eat whereas the stop brain kicks in when we’ve had enough. But the processed food industry has come up with a way to override this delicate system. It’s called the bliss point and it describes the exact Open / Comment