When I tell people that I’m a dietitian, they tend to assume that I spend most of my time doling out nutrition education.

I do of course spend a lot of time translating nutrition research into practical guidance. If I recommend something to one of my clients, I want to be able to explain my reasoning.

But nutrition advice—guiding people on how and what to eat—is really only a part of my work.

Another part of my job, and sometimes the bigger part, is to help clients identify why there’s a gap between aspiration and reality.

Most of us have a set of behaviors, food-related or otherwise, that we’d like to be doing regularly. Yet we struggle to actually implement them.

I think that there are a number of reasons for this, but perhaps the most common one is our human tendency to make life more difficult than it needs to be.

When it comes to diet, many of us would eat better overall if we could close the gap between our ideals—whether that’s cooking everything from scratch, eschewing all processed food, or adhering to some eating style that’s far too strict—and the reality of our lives.

Each week, I try to persuade my clients to scale back the expectations that and high standards that they hold themselves to.

For example, I ask them to make a food plan that would be suitable for their toughest and most stressful week, rather than their smoothest week. A client once told me that this was the single best piece of advice I’d ever given her, and it obviously had nothing to do with nutrition, per se.

It’s easy for me to give this kind of encouragement when it comes to eating, because I’ve been practicing for a while and have observed these patterns of self-sabotage again and again.

Yet I’m no stranger to the same tendencies that I focus on as a professional.

In the past week, I realized how often I make my own life harder than it needs to be in every area besides food.

I overpack my schedule. I say yes to things that I’m not really obligated to do, creating unnecessary resentment along the way.

I get fixated on habits for no good reason other than that I read about them in some self-help or productivity book. (Do I really need to wake up by [X] time every day? How important is it that I accomplish [X] many tasks before [X] hour of the morning?)

I fixate on unimportant minutiae—the perfect phrasing in a social media post caption, a color-coded schedule or perfectly bulleted to-do list—while big and actually important tasks go unattended to.

Obviously, these are small ways in which I make my life difficult. I do it in bigger ways, too, such as worrying too much, a tendency toward really bad negative self-talk, and a habit of dwelling on the past.

But the little areas of overcomplicating life are what I’m focusing on today.

Those are the places that truly hinder most of my clients from having better relationships with food. And those small, sneaky bits and pieces of needless difficulty create so much of my everyday tension and stress as well.

With this in mind, for the past seven days I’ve invited myself to notice when I’m making anything—a recipe, an email thread, a work task, an errand—more complicated than it needs to be. And I’ve given myself the challenge of course-correcting and scaling back.

It’s been really tricky, which I think my fellow over-thinkers and over-complicaters will understand. But it’s a good practice, and it keeps me in a space of authenticity and empathy as someone who works in a helping profession.

I’m wishing you a week that’s only as complex and only as difficult as it needs to be, and is as simple as it can be.

Happy Sunday, friends. Here are some recipes and reads.

Recipes

1. Eager to use a batch of my roasted beets in this pesto recipe.

2. A zesty recipe for kicking off soup season.

3. Kevin Gillespie’s recipe for creamless creamed corn is almost magically simple.

4. Nothing beats a simple rice pilaf for a dinner side dish.

5. These date scones are calling to me—a perfect fall breakfast treat.

Reads

1. Martha McPhee has penned a really brave account of her struggle to end an unhealthy dependence on Xanax.

2. Three healthcare practices that are being reconsidered for older adults (a revised stance on thickened liquids is especially pertinent to me as an RD).

3. This is an essay about one man’s surprising connection with the blue heron. But it’s also an account of emerging from depression, and I thought it was beautiful.

Jarod K. Anderson writes,

It would be reductive and dishonest to say that my road to mental health was as simple as inviting nature back into my life. It wasn’t. Yet, reconnecting with the natural world was a key step along the way. Often, to heal, we need a reason to seek healing. Depression tells us there are no such reasons, that healing is hard and not worth the effort. Nature told me something different.

Whether it’s nature or something else that brings you back to life, yes. Yes to that.

4. An interesting examination of lucid dreaming.

5. Speaking of things that overcomplicate life, procrastination! And how to overcome it.

Hope you have a restful, pleasant Sunday evening ahead of you.

I had brunch today with family members who were visiting from out of town. And hopefully I’ll have some time to whip up a batch of sun-dried tomato pesto (with the two bags of sun-dried tomatoes that I uncovered during my pantry clear out) before the day is over.

Till soon,

xo