A couple of weeks ago my parents were visiting and for a long weekend we went to St Ives in Cornwall. St Ives is a little seaside town and that my parents last visited exactly 40 years ago when they were living in the UK.

One morning Ali and I went out for a stroll to get some breakfast. While I enjoy coffee, it doesn’t bother me whether I have it or not. For me it’s not that big a deal.

Ali is very different. She really likes coffee and it’s more of a must rather than a take or leave it thing. Whenever we go away she’ll scour Trip Advisor, find the most liked coffee place that knows what it’s doing and make a beeline to it to give it a test.

So as usual we ended up in a coffee shop. We weren’t in any hurry and it was rather miserable outside, so we started chatting with the owner. Asking about how to make certain drip coffees at home. Or how Ali could make the best coffee at work with the new coffee machine that she was excited about.

The advice that we received back was rather confusing. The guy was incredibly enthusiastic but it was like he was speaking a foreign language. He was talking about certain measurements or referencing things we had never heard of.

I remember standing there, nodding my head in agreement, while on the inside thinking, “what the f&@k is this guy talking about”.

At some point Ali asked him how long he had been running the store and he mentioned that he got into coffee about 2 years prior and then set up the shop.

This made a lot of sense.

To be able to explain complex ideas so that anyone can understand them is a real skill. You have to have a deep understanding of the topic to be able to break it down or to use analogies that enhances the recipients understanding.

If this isn’t the case, all you end up doing is parroting back complex ideas that you partly understand, not helping the recipient who knows even less about the subject than you do.

While this can be a characteristic of someone who is a novice, I also see practitioners doing this as a way of justifying their existence. From my perspective, this often comes from a place of fear and insecurity.

They feel the need to speak to a client in a manner that is over the client’s head to show that they know more than them. To show them that they are “well researched”. To show that they are worth the money they are charging out at.

And rather than taking complex ideas and making them simple, they regularly do the opposite. They take simple ideas and add in complexity. Because complexity shows that they are “smart”.

There are also instances where things get over simplified. Everything gets blamed on carbs or sugar or insulin or grains. A situation that is highly complex and multifactorial is simplified into a one-line answer that “explains” it all.

Or they find this area that very few people know in detail or that few have heard terms relating to. In reality this area is tiny in what it can do for you. It may make a difference of 0.01%. But it is talked about as this “big idea” and that it’s “cutting edge” and that they’re so smart because no one else has figured it out yet.

I remember a number of years ago watching a series of webinars put on by a Functional Medicine Practitioner. The webinars were aimed at practitioners and looked at how to build up a successful practice. Everything from how to bring in clients, how to speak to them, and how to use various tests.

One piece of advice that I remember being given was in regards to the language used with clients. The practitioner advised that throughout the consult, every 4 or 5 minutes, use a medical term that the client probably won’t understand or they’ve only vaguely heard of. He suggested that by doing this you’ll be demonstrating a level of expertise and authority to the client, so they know that you know what you are talking about.

This kind of advice just smacks of insecurity. A client has come to you to better improve their health and understand why they are getting the symptoms they are. And apparently part of this the solution is to regularly throw in confusing words to make them know how “knowledgeable” you are.

Over the years I’ve stripped back my explanations with clients. If I need to talk about hormones or complex processes, I take the time to break this down so they understand it. I never want to bewilder someone, but instead have them get a grasp of what’s going on.

It means that there may be complex things I’m doing that never get mentioned. I don’t need to justify this stuff by explaining it, but prefer people to learn that I know what I’m doing because of the results.

But it also means that a lot of the complexity has been removed. I’ve discovered so many of the recommendations make very little difference. So instead I hammer the things that will genuinely help.

It may mean that what I recommend with people can seem “basic”. But there is a difference between someone understanding the basics in theory versus doing the basics in reality. And when people actually follow through on these basics, it’s amazing the results they see.

Nutrition in lots of ways is incredibly complex. There are times when we need to honour this complexity for what it is. But in other ways, nutrition can be very simple. But when people try to complicate things to justify their “worth” then this has changed from being about the client to being about themself. And this isn’t what a client and practitioner relationship should be about.