Procrastinating, Stressing, Eating: Willpower Joy Food

By Dianne Wintle

Procrastinating, Stressing, Eating is for the thinking person, usually a woman, who is busy, probably cares for others (or has in the past), and probably also has paid employment. The demands on her time, and also on her mental bandwidth, are constant. She recognises her own health is important, that change is necessary (soon), but whil

• Language: English
• Publisher: Uncommon Spirits
• Release date: Feb 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780648211716

Dianne Wintle

Dianne Wintle is an Accredited Practising Dietitian with a Master of Health Science (Hons) awarded for her research centred around procrastination, stress and obesity in nurses. Dianne has worked as a dietitian in private practice, in community health, in clinical dietetics and in Aboriginal health. She also lectured in Nutrition and Dietetics at Charles Sturt University from 2008 to 2016. Coming to dietetics later in life, after a varied career, allowed for a different perspective. While still studying it was obvious to her templates are of little use to the individual trying to lose weight. Fat people are not stupid! The issues were clear to Dianne that education would do little to help the situation. Lack of knowledge was not the main issue. Her studies fell short, but her research made matters clearer. Having seen many people in private practice who were procrastinating over weight loss, Dianne had the anecdotal evidence, she searched widely across disciplines for commentary and research, and had wide response to her own research. She adds to this the 'lived experience' of being overweight much of her adult life. This led to Procrastinating, Stressing, Eating. On a personal level Dianne is married to Adrian, and has two children, Edwina and Reginald. She currently lives in Wagga Wagga, NSW. Passions include family, food, reading, writing, quilting, embroidery and swimming (the last three no competence, only joy).

Book preview

willpower • joy • food

Dianne Wintle

Uncommon Spirits

Copyright © Dianne Wintle 2018

Published by Uncommon Spirits

Neslo Arcade, 117 Baylis Street,

Wagga Wagga, New South Wales 2650, Australia

www.diannewintle.com.au

Illustrations by Guy Exton

Book and cover design by Debbie Angel

Procrastinating, Stressing, Eating. —1st ed.

ISBN 978-0-6482117-0-9

ISBN 978-0-6482117-1-6 (e-book)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

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For Meryl, and all those who put the wellbeing of others ahead of their own

Foreword

Procrastination. A universal human behaviour, one that is dynamic, time-critical, ultimately individual.

When we make a decision, the decision made reflects the culmination of our life experience up to that moment. Having to make a decision triggers a series of trade-offs, a shifting of internal priorities, to consciously or subconsciously choose X over Y. Each decision is being made relative to an exchangeable set of possible consequences – what might we be willing to compromise in this moment to achieve one consequence over another.

But what happens when a decision today does have an expected consequence, but the consequence only appears decades later? Decisions about food fall into this category.

Scientific evidence gives us a set of expected consequences from our daily decisions about food. What to eat to avoid disease has been presented from Western scientific methods for many decades. Arguably, therefore, each decision we make about food is informed and can be more considered.

Put simply, we know what to eat, why can’t we just do it? Because, there is something different about food-health decisions and their consequences. In this book, Wintle explores the intricacies of food-health decisions. She draws on her multidisciplinary perspectives of a strategically selected career, and, in particular, her years as a curator of human behaviour as a practising dietitian.

Why can’t we just eat as the science tells us? Here’s a hint (by no means a spoiler!): There is not only a considerable time lag between a decision about food and its possible consequence, but the expected consequence may or may not even happen.

We make decisions about food four, five, maybe twenty or more times a day, sometimes just for us, sometimes on behalf of others. For example, why choose to eat the birthday cake today on the off-chance you might end up with diabetes ten years from now? Because right now, in the birthday celebration today, you are willing to trade any possible expected health consequences down the track.

Similarly, why choose a packet of chocolate biscuits ($2 on special) over a banana ($2) when you know the banana is the healthy choice? Because from the chocolate biscuits you not only derive maximum satisfaction for yourself, you also create an opportunity for others to achieve their own satisfaction.

Why put off such gratifying immediate satisfaction for something that may or may not even happen at some point in the future? In fact, behavioural economics suggests it is rational for us to prioritise immediate satisfaction over any possible negative consequences down the track.

In this book, Wintle describes this rational decision-gratification moment as an active dialogue with self, reminding us such dialogue is ours and we have complete autonomy in it. In particular, Wintle says there’s a third party, a future self with a vested interest too in this moment of decision-making. How we choose to moderate this future self in our decision-making is where Wintle offers new ways of understanding behaviour. But is inviting our future self to decisions enough to break the eat, stress, procrastinate cycle we’ve built up over years?

Throughout the book, Wintle treats the terms satisfaction and utility as interchangeable, which they are, and it is utility that is a central tenet of behavioural economics. Understanding a person’s utility, Wintle suggests, is key to effective behavioural counselling.

Wintle’s hypothesis is this: if we can get people to understand their procrastination about health, we can bring health benefits earlier to people’s lives. Economically speaking, Wintle proposes we can improve population health, achieve cost savings, by reducing the time it takes people to reach the peak of the hyperbolic discounting curve, to change the dynamic of people’s procrastination by leveraging their utility.

In this book, Wintle unfolds the layers of complexity of human behaviour. She seamlessly takes the reader by the hand, and walks them through chapters of philosophical positioning, economic theory, and empirical inquiry, peppered with case study narratives.

The time dependence of the procrastination cycle, Wintle explains, can change at any time, but is more likely to be amenable to change as we age. This book can disrupt the cycle, bringing our future self to the conversation earlier for a potentially healthier future.

As a self-help book, there are clearly challenges in the supply–demand dynamics of the target audience. After all, procrastinators gonna procrastinate. However, if we all got this book for our 21st birthday, there’s the first hurdle cleared! The book is on the shelf.

But this book is far more than a self-help book. For any health professional, this book is a starting point to understand what it is that drives human decisions. Using the concepts of utility, discounting, and the time dependence of behaviours as tools to give an edge to your evidence base offers the potential for cultural competence and patient-centred care. Wintle weaves for you the perfect mix of eastern and western philosophies. She takes the space to engage you in an intricate dance toward the edge of your ontological position and back, all the while maintaining the lines of integrity within our comfort paradigm.

From one master procrastinator to another, Ms Wintle, I look forward to what you do next.

Melanie Voevodin

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Chaste and continent … but not yet

Case Study 1: Ursula

Procrastination

Understanding procrastination

Language and definitions

Philosophical insights

Psychology insights

Economics insights

Behavioural economics insights

Neuroeconomics insights

Scarcity

Case Study 2: Toni

Procrastination and obesity

2 Stress: what’s in the armoury

Case Study 3: Therese

Financial stress

3 Procrastination and stress: an exploration

Procrastination, stress and obesity

Case Study 4: Flo

Nurses and obesity

Nurses and stress and procrastination

My research

4 Habit: too weak to feel, too strong to break

Case Study 5: Pamela

Prevalence

Habit development and brain circuitry

The habit loop

Case Study 6: Meryl

5 Odysseus and the Sirens: precommitment strategies and consistent planning

Case Study 7: Anna

Declutter

6 From (hidden) abundance to willpower: thoughts to underlie the strategies

Abundance

Bundling, or summed rewards

Deadlines

Delay (how?)

Goals

Habit

Heuristics

Intentions, resolutions and implementation intentions

Leveraging control

Motivation

Mental contrasting

Mindfulness

Planning

Reward, appetite and satiation

Self-efficacy

Stimulus control

Stress management

Task aversion

Time management

Vividness

Willpower—the ultimate skill to develop

7 Strategies: employing reason and passion

Strategy 1: Find out what THEY do and copy it

Strategy 2: Turn off the TV NOW

Strategy 3: Make it yourself

Strategy 4: Plan

Strategy 5: Eat your greens

Strategy 6: Move your tail

Strategy 7: Create your own precommitment strategy,implementation intention or personal rule

8 Remembering joy while bringing things together

Keeping things simple

Closing thoughts

Interchangeable lunch and dinner recipes

Cheeky Chickpeas

Rosy Mango Dhal on Veg

Cacao and Cinnamon Chia Pudding with Mango and Berries

Red Lentil and Beetroot Fritters with Roasted Sesame Dressing and Maple Smoked Kumera Salad

Roast Kumera and Haloumi Salad with Maple Walnuts

Pumpkin, Apple and Smoky Chiptole Soup with Haloumi

Barbecue Tempeh Wrap with Raddicchio and Toasted Maple Salted Walnuts

Apricot Chicken and Rice

Scheherezade Pie

Diri Kole Ak Pwa Rouj (Red Beans and Rice)

Glossary

References

About the author

Acknowledgements

So many people have input into the development of a book such as Procrastinating, Stressing, Eating.

I am grateful for countless conversations with many, including people I’ve met in my capacity as a practising dietitian, people from my life as an academic and researcher, people who have informally mentored along the way. For all the alternative ways of thinking and knowing that all these people have shared, I am grateful. To those who have asked to remain anonymous, and those that at the moment of writing this I may have forgotten to mention, I am grateful for all you have contributed.

Specifically I would like to thank Melanie Voevodin. As a lecturer in nutrition and dietetics, one of my frequently used resources was Voevodin’s article on whether welfare recipients could afford to eat according to dietary guidelines. Refreshing, outside the box thinking. I was drawn to her presentation with the international Critical Dietetics movement, and her ongoing push for professional bodies to be free of corporate sponsorship. Her professional life incorporates stripping away the obfuscatory layers added again and again in the profit versus health battle. She was an examiner for my Masters thesis, Procrastination, Stress and Obesity in Nurses, 2016. Her extensive, generous comments on this work, encouraged me to pursue this area further and bring to a wider audience. For her generosity in writing the foreword for Procrastinating, Stressing, Eating, I am so grateful.

My thanks to my editor, writing coach, mentor, soundboard, Denise Winkler. I am sure many people have wonderful ideas for a book, but lack someone to demonstrate belief in the concept and then the all important help with structure, development, time frames and finishing in a timely fashion for market. The path from idea to book is long, and someone to provide suggestions at the hard parts, those parts where many of us might simply give up, helps ensure the idea becomes reality.

I am grateful to Guy Exton for his wonderful humour demonstrated in the cartoons throughout, and Catherine Lockley for reminding us through her recipes of the joy to be had in preparing food to share.

I thank my book designer, Debbie Angel. This book looks like something you want to take from the book shelf, to select from the sea of competitors, thanks to her innate sense of what is appealing. I discuss things how I see them, and she turns my concepts, however partially described, into graphic art. Graphic art that illuminates my thoughts.

The book designer’s task was made easier, by the countless hours spent by my anonymous editor, who fixed some of my sloppy sentences, (many I wanted to keep, just as they were, much to her frustration) moved things for better effect, fixed references for minor detail, and offered suggestions along the way. I am so grateful.

Original help was provided with statistics by Sharon Nielsen. Sharon’s generosity and patience for the statistically challenged was truly amazing, and I thank her again for this.

Charles Sturt University librarian Karen Mackney patiently and graciously originally demonstrated efficient use of everything from data bases to endnote, and I thank her again. Again, for many of us, it is the added little things that help along the way to make the difference.

My thanks to Sue McAlpin, my dietetics lecturer, my nutrition and dietetics course coordinator during my time as lecturer, and my original supervisor for Master’s thesis. Sue’s openness to my less than usual desired line of enquiry meant the difference to whether the original project was ever even started. Her flexibility and humour are rare and valued.

I would like to thank the people who read and made considered comments