Finding a connection between what you are doing and what you want has somehow been encountered in our life. What makes it more difficult to transition from point A to point B is that they are not much related to each other. However, if we can overcome this barrier, it can lead to a deeper understanding of our desired path, ultimately resulting in a more meaningful life.
In this episode, Kaitlin Borncamp takes us through her remarkable journey of transformation from a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) to a Wellness Advisor. Kaitlin shares her insights on how the principles of financial accounting can be applied to health and wellness, and provides valuable advice on overcoming the obstacles that often prevent people from making significant career transitions.
Tune in to this inspiring episode to learn from Kaitlin’s experiences and gain valuable insights.
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Making Connection Between Financial Accounting and Health with Kaitlin Borncamp
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Oftentimes in life, we want to make some sort of change, some kind of a transition, and we have a limited mindset with regards to the stories that we tell ourselves about what is possible, what is related. We oftentimes hear something along the lines of, “Find your transferable skills,” which, for some people, only means the obvious, and for some people, only means that you can only make small changes, say, from software engineer to data scientist or something that’s quite a bit related. However, my guest today, Kaitlin Borncamp, who is the founder of Feel Great with Kait, made the transition from accountant to nutritional wellness coach, if I’m saying that right.
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Kaitlin, welcome to the program.
Thanks, Stephen. Thanks for having me.
And is that right? Nutritional wellness coach?
Yeah, I like to go by wellness advisor because there’s so much more to nutrition — or so much more to wellness than just nutrition.
Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, that’s like one aspect of what you put into your body but there’s like do you move your body, do you get sunlight, do you put yourself under stress, all those things, you probably have a more comprehensive list than I do.
Exactly, exactly.
So the first thing I want to ask is that there’s probably a lot of people listening and also a lot of people out there in the world that are doing something that they’re not so thrilled with at this point in time, looking to get something different in their lives, looking to make a change, and not seeing maybe even a connection between what they’re doing and what they want. Now, accounting to wellness advising, to nutritional type of thing, does not sound obvious to most people. What is the connection and what makes them in your view related to one another?
Yeah, I love this question and I actually get this response a lot when people kind of hear my background and things. So, I would say a few ways that financial reporting accounting are related to health and wellness and one of them has to do with how it impacts us personally. So, when we think of something like accounting and finance, like an organization, the health of an organization, there’s so many different things going on and, most oftentimes, most people in the organization, they don’t really want to know what the accountants are doing. They’re like, “Yeah, you guys got it covered. We appreciate you. We know we need you,” but most people in an organization are like, “You guys got it, you know, I don’t really want to know.”
Yeah.
It’s a very complex system. There’s a lot of different points of information, data, as we call it in financial systems today, coming from a lot of different parts of the organization. In fact, all parts of the organization, right? They need to be rolled up, they need to be consolidated, for us accounting nerds out there, those are called adjusting journal entries and it goes into financial report, if you’re public, it gets reported out to Wall Street, which sort of indicates like a stock price so let’s just compare the health of an organization to something like a stock price because these are things that people can relate to, versus going into our health and really thinking our bodies are complex systems as well. We take in information from all different parts of our life, like you’ve already mentioned a few of the big ones, exercise, sleep, sunlight, stress, all of those things beyond just what we typically think of as nutrition and the food that we put in our body.
Yeah.
It just does it, and so if you give it the right sort of data, like in a system, if you get good data in, good data out versus, in health, if you give it the right nutrients and the right things, the inputs, you’re going to have overall a really high sense of wellbeing, high level of health, that sort of thing so that’s sort of from a theoretical standpoint as to how financial reporting and accounting are similar to health.
I would say from a more tactical and personal perspective, it’s about understanding that our daily choices impact our overall and long-term wellbeing. Share on XSo, on an organization, you think about on a day-to-day basis, there’s hundreds or thousands of transactions, depending on what type of organization that you have going on, and on a day-by-day basis, we’re not always looking at certain snapshots of, “Hey, how is this doing?” And, similarly, on health, you may not see sort of the changes on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, maybe a little bit in terms of, hey, if I don’t have my coffee, I might get a headache type of thing, your body’s trying to tell you something, but how does that trend to the long-term health? Because, ultimately, that’s what we’re all looking to achieve is balancing the short-term satisfaction of the yummy food and the things that we do on a daily basis versus the long-term health and we really do want to have that sort of longevity to our life.
So it’s that similar balance both in finance and in health, and sometimes they’re together. So, for example, you could take a night and say, “We’re gonna have a great night out, we’re gonna get the fanciest food, we’re gonna have some drinks, we’re gonna dance until 3:30 in the morning,” and that’s probably going to be bad for your health in the long term because of the food you consume, the drink you consume, the alcohol, and it’s probably also going to be bad, especially if you live in a pretty major metropolitan area, you could easily spend $100, $200 on a night out like that, possibly more to be honest, like I bet there’s a lot of people out there with fancier tastes than me. And those nights feel good, they feel good to your body in some way, or psychologically, but they’re not a habit, whereas if you were to do that every single night, you’d end up, well, in a load of hurt, both financially and health wise.
Right, yeah, your bank account. You’d be getting a lot of points on your credit card but, yeah, probably not great for your overall monthly budget. You’re exactly right. It’s sort of that balance of — and nights like that, they may feed your soul. You may have a really great time dancing at 3 a.m. at the bar or something, whatever you like to do at 3 a.m. If you do that every day, that’s when you’ll start to get in sort of a world of hurt.
Yeah, for sure. And so what is the balance? So what do you say in both capacities toward nights like that, or any event like that, it doesn’t have to take the same form but it could be any other way of like, “Okay, I bought a cake for my birthday, and cake is not the best thing for me but I’m gonna have it,” and if you live life never splurging, never going for the thing, there’ll be a certain monotony to it. I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s like a balance you can find where people can figure out how often or in what capacity they can nourish their soul with something that’s bad for their long-term health but also still maintain their long-term health through normal daily habits.
Absolutely. This is such a great question because it totally comes up when I’m talking to people and everybody wants to be healthier but, of course, we want to eat the donut too, you know? And it’s like, okay, how can we have both? Can we have both? I think the answer is yes, obviously, in moderation. So what is moderation? How do we define that? I like to go sort of by the 90/10 rule, or maybe the 80/20 rule, depending on your level of health. So, if you’re at a pretty good point in your health, you don’t have an autoimmune condition, you don’t have any sort of large underlying diseases or anything like that, most people can kind of get away with an 80/20, where 80 percent of the time, you’re eating very nutritious food, majority of them are home cooked, they’re high quality, they’re well-balanced meals, all the good things, you’re getting movement, you’re getting exercise, and then the rest of the 20 percent, those are your Friday, Saturday nights where you’re able to have the pizza and drink the beer type of thing. As long as you don’t let that additional 20 percent sort of creep in and you don’t have huge vendors on the weekend that takes you three days to recover in the next week sort of thing, you’re going to be okay, and that’s one thing I always like to instill with people that I work with is our bodies are very resilient. They’re actually much more resilient than we even realize, and so we have a lot to be thankful for and also we can use that in our benefit to enjoy those sorts of fun things. And another way I would relate this back actually to sort of accounting and finance and things like that is when I’m working with large organizations for financial transformations, we have to use the same principles. Anytime you’re dealing with any sort of system or financial reporting, you can’t solve for 100 percent of it. It just won’t work. You can’t automate something and solve also for 100 percent of the use cases so you will sort of always default to this 80/20 rule. So it’s very common also in the industry as well in any sort of transformation or system implementation to sort of figure out what do we need to make our 80 percent up of and then what is our 20 percent, what can we kind of get away with on the 20 percent and handle that however it needs to be handled?
And now, what role does finding habits that are both healthy and nourishing to the soul play, first of all, if you even believe that’s possible?
Yeah, you mean nourishing habits?
The bender, that was nourishing to the soul but not very healthy for the long term. When we talk about, say, okay, eating, I don’t know, some sort of really healthy food and having one of those days where you cook all your meals at home, they’re all really nutritious, you do a workout, but none of it’s necessarily soul nourishing, they’re just like kind of those habits to get by. Is there a role or even a necessity to find habits that are both good for the long term and nourishing to the soul?
Absolutely. And it is possible. It’s completely possible. So this is where the mindset work comes in. So, you know that saying where the wife wants her husband to want to do the dishes type of thing?
Yeah.
So this is where this plays in where you want to get to a point where you want to eat the healthy food and most people, if you’re on the other side of it where you’re just starting your health journey or you’re kind of eating a lot of processed food and you think, “I’m never gonna want to eat a salad, Kaitlin,” I’m like, okay, let’s not start with salads, okay? We don’t have to force you to eat salads right away. That’s not the point. The point is let’s think about this in a mindset where, yes, our habits can be healthy and if we approach it in a way that’s welcoming to us where we don’t have to eat salads every day, basically, so if I were to tell somebody who’s just starting off on their health journey, “Okay, well, the only way for you to be healthy is to eat a salad for breakfast,” they’re gonna be like, “That’s disgusting,” right? Even your face right now, you’re like, “Oh, gosh, that does not sound very yummy.” So let’s not start off with that. Let’s start off with something else. Maybe let’s focus on dinner. Let’s focus on lunches. Let’s focus on increasing vegetables in another way that’s not just salad, that you’re not going to just cringe at when you think of and what will happen over time is a few things. One, a lot of people don’t know this, but your taste buds change pretty quickly.
So if you change your diet over a course of two to three weeks, your taste buds will change significantly. Share on XIf you take out the ultra-processed foods for a few weeks, the more whole foods such as vegetables and nuts and things like that will actually have much greater flavor to you. So that’s the first thing I would say is there’s a reason that your brain is sort of playing this trick on you right now as to why, quote-unquote, “healthy foods,” why they aren’t tasting good to you to begin with and it has a lot to do with sort of the flavoring and the additives in processed foods. And then, also, it’s the mindset too where, I love this part when I get to get to this point with clients, is I suggest a few things, they make a few changes, and a month goes by and they don’t want to go back to eating the same things that they were doing. And that’s on their own agenda because they’ve realized how they feel. They’ve realized how much more clarity they have at work. They’ve realized how much more energy they have at 2 p.m. and they’re not reaching for that second cup of coffee. So, once you get a little sort of flavor, pun intended here, once you get a little bit sort of flavor as to how good nourishing food can feel, you’re much more motivated to want those habits and, to answer your first question, it goes back to, yes, habits can be nourishing and you can want to do them as well.
So you’re saying that if you train your taste buds a little bit, if you get your taste buds more accustomed to the types of foods that are better for you long term, you’re going to start craving those out of some sort of mental desire for consistency or is there some other mechanism?
Yeah, I would say that’s part of it. I would also just say, let’s not go to the word “craving” because I think some people will probably still be hung up on that.
I personally, people are going to think I’m crazy, I eat salad all the time with breakfast. I love popping on an egg on top of some mixed greens and that took me a while to work up to. I used to eat the typical cereal, I used to eat the highly flavor protein shake that was super yummy and sweet. I have a sweet tooth myself so going to something like a savory thing for breakfast, I had to reorient myself as well. So it takes time to get there and it’s not something that you have to do every day, that’s sort of going back to the 80/20 thing is that anything you kind of hear in the realm of health and wellness is you don’t have to do it strict 100 percent of the time every single day. I think that’s what we kind of get hung up on as immediately as humans, we’re like, “Oh, that’s way too rigid for me.” Again, I want to be able to eat donut, I want to be able to have the pizza and the beer or whatever once in a while, it’s like, okay, we can do both things, you just have to be able to find what works for you.
And with this whole retrain your taste buds or developing new habits, is it similar to the other habit research where they often tell you that if you get to, say, 21 days, and I don’t know if that’s a magic number, I’ve heard other people dispute that number and say it varies from person to person, situation to situation, but is it about kind of overcoming getting over a wall to the point where, okay, for a while, you’re forcing yourself, for a while, you’re reliant on your willpower to say, but we all have a limited amount of willpower as so many other people have said as well, but then once you get over that hump, you start to desire in some sort of way, you start to want this new behavior that you’ve gotten to essentially.
Exactly, yeah, and I love that you brought up the willpower because, again, I think that’s another huge misnomer in the realm of health and wellness again is that people are like, “Well, if I have to rely on willpower every single day for the rest of my life, I’m not gonna do it,” and we’ve all done that, right? If you’ve tried to do some sort of diet or some sort of, “I’ll start on Monday with a new workout routine,” whatever the thing is, you realize pretty hard that you could not rely on willpower for the rest of your life. I mean, it’s just limited. That’s just who we are as humans. So, yeah, I don’t know exactly to what the exact timing is in terms of science as to when your taste buds change, I would venture to guess that I’m sure it varies for all of us, I’m sure it varies as to what food you’re currently eating, what food you’re changing it up with, do you sort of have a ramp up period where you only eat half your food as processed and half as whole foods or do you go full straight send to all whole foods and all nourishing foods? So it kind of varies probably, I’m assuming. But going back to the willpower, yeah, I would say so let’s just use the example of 21 days, I think that’s a good estimate.
The other quote out there is to really instill a new habit, you have to do it for 66 days. So, whatever that time period is, between 21 to 66 days, I think another key shift is happening as well. So we don’t have to rely as much on willpower because our identity is changing. And so one huge reason I see people fail when they instill new, quote-unquote, “healthy habits” or their New Year’s resolutions related to health is because they’re only relying on willpower, they’re not sticking with it long enough for it to become their new identity. So, think of how different this sounds. “Oh, I’m really trying to eat healthier so I can lose weight.” Well, that implies a sense of luck. If you’re trying to do something, you’re not doing it, okay? And in your mind, you’re letting yourself have an escape. You’re letting yourself say, “Well, I’m just trying to do this,” knowing fairly well that you probably won’t, you’re sort of leaving this huge gap that says, “Well, if I don’t do this, it’s fine. It’s just another one of those things that I tried and it didn’t work,” versus if you rely on your willpower for a short couple of weeks, long enough for you to feel how it feels to actually execute whatever the new habit is, then you can be able to shift your identity honestly. So you no longer are just lying to yourself when you say, “I am somebody who shows up and goes to the gym three days a week.” That’s a lot different than just, “I’m trying to lose weight.”
So at what point do you start believing? Because I think there’s some schools of thought out there that will say, let’s just say, you say, “I’m gonna make my lunch every day,” and so now you suddenly say, “I’m no longer the person who drives through the drive-thru. I’m the person that prepares a lunch at noon every day.” Does it take a few days for you to actually believe it before you can start saying this, “I am…” as opposed to, “I’m trying to…” statement?
Yeah, I would say it takes a few weeks, for sure. And another thing to consider too is there’s always the old adage of when you’re starting a new habit, tell people about it. I think that this reconfirms exactly what I’m saying is that if you tell other people, just like you said, “I’m the person who brings my lunch,” you tell your colleague or, now, a lot of people work from home, whoever you’re going to tell, even your colleagues virtually, “I make my lunch every single day,” you are basically creating self-accountability from the people around you just because you told them that you were going to do something, thus re-instilling that identity that you’re trying to create. So, in terms of how long does it take, it’s a few factors, it varies for everyone, and I would say try your best at first. This is where having an accountability coach comes in. This is where having the support of family and friends comes in. This is where I think another key part that often goes unlooked or untalked about is what are those thoughts that you’re thinking to yourself when nobody’s around? What are those thoughts that you’re thinking to yourself when you’re tired and you sat down on the couch after a long day at work? What are you thinking and feeling then? That is still your true identity. I’m a morning person so I get most of my bursts of energy in the morning so it’s very easy for me to wake up, pop out of bed, and just feel really good about the day and all the things that I’m trying to create and the new habits I’m trying to instill. And, yes, I’m going to do this. And then, slowly throughout the day, you’re given opportunities to show up and do them. The next time that that opportunity comes up, so let’s say, for example, we’re talking about eating lunch at a drive-thru, okay, lunchtime comes around the next day, what are you doing? First, I would ask you if you’re trying to create a new identity of somebody who brings lunch or prepares lunch. Did you already prepare the lunch? Because having the identity of somebody who prepares lunch is going to be a lot easier if you already prepared yourself with the lunch. Does that make sense? Versus having lunchtime pop up and being like, “Crap, I don’t have a lunch right now. I have to go to the drive-thru.”
So that habit, you need to make easier, and the old habit you need to make harder. Share on X
So, the old habit you make harder, the new habit you make easier, which seems pretty straightforward. Question is, does that originate from the mindset? Do you have to think about it before you put those systems in place? So let’s just say, if you want to make it harder to go through the drive-thru, maybe you kind of put your wallet somewhere else and put the food you’re going to cook right there, I’m just trying to think of kind of those general placement issues, does that originate from you telling yourself, like are you not going to do the things you need to do to make the old habit harder and the new habit easier until your self-talk becomes more in line with a new habit?
Exactly. Yes, definitely. I would say that part probably specifically comes from the willpower. So this is where it would be very helpful for you to use your willpower because it is so limited in energy, use your willpower very strategically.
Use your willpower not in the moment of when you’re making that decision... Share on Xbecause, again, it’s a really high cost to our willpower. It takes a lot more willpower for me to decline driving through the drive-thru every day if I’m used to doing that, versus a tiny amount of willpower, like you just said, for me to put my keys somewhere else or for me to put my wallet somewhere else the night before or the day before, the morning that you get into the office, whatever the situation is, versus in the moment when you’re starving and you’re hungry and you’re craving the food that you’re used to eating. It’s another example too is you can’t stop snacking or something in the pantry. Super simple thing, a lot of people are like, “Well, I can’t stop buying it, I have kids in the house,” whatever your situation is. Okay, that’s fine. Well then, just put something in front of that in the pantry. That way, every time you open the pantry, that bag of chips isn’t staring you in the face. It’s a lot lower level of willpower to put something in front of a bag of chips in the pantry than it is to not grab the chips in the moment that you’re hungry.
So is part of the struggle identifying periods of time when you have a lot of willpower, like, say, for you, it’s first thing in the morning, so first thing in the morning, you’re energetic as a morning person and you’re going to naturally feel like, “Okay, I want this new habit to take place, so, it’s 8 a.m., I’m happy, I’m energetic, I haven’t quite started my workday, I’m gonna start doing the things now,” whether it be, say, I don’t know, putting the chicken out to thaw that it will be thawed by the time it’s time to make lunch and you can just kind of chop it up and put it into something healthy or something like that. If another person’s a night owl and then they’re naturally at their best at 10, 11, midnight, maybe they’re the ones that should be doing some of these habits at 10, 11, midnight. And at that point in time, you have a lot of energy and you’re saying, “Okay, what can I do? What can I do to, even, say, put a book more accessible than my phone the next time I want to like instead of scrolling through Instagram, read something more meaningful”?
Yeah, exactly. That’s a great point. You know, I hadn’t totally correlated it between the morning person and the night owl but I love that idea. It’s sort of like finding what works for you and the way that you do that is trial and error, by trying new habits and seeing what worked, what didn’t work. Another aspect, I would say, that’s similar and overlaps between financial reporting and finance versus health and wellness is it’s very common in large transformation projects to do what’s called a retrospective and, basically, what that means is you have a look back as to what went well, what didn’t go well, what can we do different next time. Most people when they’re setting new healthy habits never do a retro of their past healthy habits and say, “Okay, this is the 10th year in a row I’m trying to lose weight for New Year’s resolution, what did I do last year? What worked? What didn’t work?” and be honest with yourself. And if we’re talking about some of these habits in terms of things that you can do on a daily basis, only you will know that and it’s important for you to sort of gather that information because then it’ll help you make better decisions in the future. So, there’s different ways to do that.
Again, working with a coach is a great idea because then you sort of have somebody to talk to about it and bounce ideas off of, “Oh, I tried this,” it’s like, “Okay, well, let’s try this differently next time.” Another way you could do it is, as you’re trying to instill a new habit or work on whatever the new thing is, write down a few things. What went well today? What didn’t go well today? What could I have done differently? And going back to how do you prepare and sort of using willpower, I would say what you need to do in order to help you nail the next healthy habit is think through who would you be if. So, who would you be if you were the person who didn’t go through the drive-thru and brought lunch every day? How would that person wake up in the morning? They’d probably have lunch prepared, or at least they would have a plan for lunch. They wouldn’t just wake up like a normal day, drink the coffee, have the breakfast then wait for lunch to roll around and be like, “Oh, shoot, I guess I can’t make lunch today because I don’t have any food in the fridge and I didn’t prepare lunch,” It’s like you have to sort of have a little bit of planning and really think about when you are planning it, it’s not about just — I have some qualms with our society today and just do the habit, just do it. It’s like there’s — again, that’s only relying on willpower, like we’ve already acknowledged that only gets you so far.
Yeah. And so I got to bring this up given that we’re recording this in mid-March. I had read somewhere that the average New Year’s resolution only lasts until January 19th. That’s been told, the median date in which people have been in their resolutions. Is there like a better time for people to resolve things or better, say, increment in which to resolve? Because it seems like there seems to be some relying on willpower, at least in the beginning until you kind of achieve this new identity, but is our willpower, say, being used at the wrong time a year, being that New Year’s is oftentimes the coldest, most depressing time of year for a lot of people in the US and Europe and East Asia and stuff like that or are we trying to do too much at once? Do we need to kind of say, “Okay, we need to use our willpower to change this one habit,” and then once we get through that, undeplete, revive our willpower that’s been depleted, and then kind of use it to change another habit little bit in increments at a time as opposed to just this grand plan on New Year’s Eve when you’re a little bit sloshed?
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it depends on each person, I don’t think there’s a bad time to start a new habit or to change your health. What I don’t like about the New Year’s situation is that most of us are coming off of the holiday season where we binge a lot, we sort of give ourselves this big permission to eat more than we would eat, eat all the sweets that we don’t normally eat, we probably drink a little bit more, all the fun stuff, all the holiday parties and all the good stuff so it feels really good because holidays are all warm and fuzzy and stuff but from a health perspective, we kind of let ourselves just sort of fall off the bandwagon and then we use a New Year’s resolution time, you know, January as the time to do dry January because I just drank a bunch the last few weeks over Christmas and New Year’s and Hanukkah and all the good holidays. And so it’s a mindset thing. We’re really setting ourselves up kind of for failure because we’re just saying, “Well, I’m gonna let myself go for the six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s and then don’t worry, body, I’ll just fix you in January and we’ll be good to go.” So you’re already sort of approaching it as a short-term habit. You’re already sort of approaching it as, “Well. I only really need to do this in January,” right? And one obvious thing I would say to that if people are like, “Well, no, Kaitlin, I start off January with really good intentions to continue this habit,” I would ask, okay, well, what were your habits that you tried to do last January that you weren’t doing last holiday season in November and December? By November and December, they’re gone. They’re long gone. And so that’s why I say there’s really no bad time to start a new habit, I would just sort of say you can use the momentum for New Year’s resolutions, if it works for you, but don’t approach it from the mindset of, “I’m just gonna use my willpower.” You really have to change your identity and that’s what most people miss. Another thing I would say too that just came up for me is when we’re talking about this whole new year’s resolution thing, every Monday is kind of like a mini New Year’s resolution, if you think about it. Everybody is like, “I’m gonna start on Monday.” Okay, the weekend, right? Weekend, so Friday is kind of like November because it’s sort of like a half day in November where Thanksgiving is at the end of the month, and then Saturday and Sunday are basically like December, and then Monday comes around and it’s January 1st, you’re like, “Oh, I’m gonna start on Monday,” and you ramp up and you have all these good things to eat healthier, exercise or go to the gym or whatever your New Year’s resolution is, and then by the end of the week on Friday, you’re already ready to party again.
Yeah, like for a lot of people Tuesday night is wing night in a lot of places, you’ve already done something Tuesday which is kind of the equivalent of mid-March, I guess.
Yeah.
Interesting. Yeah, I have to be 100 percent vulnerable and admit that the one time I did dry January, did it for the whole month of January, but then February 4th, I was walking around town looking for a credit card I had misplaced at a bar only to realize that I had not misplaced it on February 3rd, I had actually misplaced it on February 1st and not even realized it. So, I know firsthand about how dry January could really be thought of as lasting only the month of January.
Yeah. Isn’t that interesting? So it’s like when you go into something already kind of knowing when it’ll end, it goes back to the statement of I’m trying to, you’re giving yourself an out, which is okay. I would say for anybody who’s curious or for anybody who just successfully completed dry January, congrats to you, I do think that there’s still merit in that, it’s still a great accomplishment. You are still learning a lot about yourself. It’s really more so of when I talk about being a wellness advisor to people, I’m trying to elevate their health baseline and that means we may take two steps forward and one step back at certain times so it’s not about not making mistakes but it’s basically about how can we instill sustainable habits that you will take with you for the rest of your life, continuing to want to do the healthy habits.
Yeah. And then you talk a lot about mindset and the mindset that leads to the habits. Is there a return where the new habits, say, the different food you’re ingesting or the different habits you’re — say, you’re reading a book instead of mindless social media content or anything like that, where that, in turn, enhances your mindset, has an impact on your mindset, that makes it easier to say do the next thing, so, okay, now I stopped going to the fast food drive-thru but now I want to do the reading instead of social media thing, now I want to do the working out thing, now I want to do the being nicer to other people thing, now I want to do the trust my instinct thing, all the other things that people then want to do.
Absolutely. Yeah, it’s really sort of this beautiful thing that unfolds where once you gain trust in yourself to accomplish one goal, it really opens the door of opportunity in your mind to say, “Hey, what else have I been afraid to try that I want to try now?”
I also want to make sure that we cover a bit about your personal story. Now, you started out your adult life as an accountant. Kind of what brought you to that field originally?
I was undeclared when I went into college and really decided on accounting, honestly, because it sounded really good. It sounded safe. It sounded like there was going to be a secure job. Also, my father has a background as an accounting professional and CPA and he owned his own firm so I think that was partial to that as well. And really realized, so when I took some accounting classes, it just made sense, it clicked for me and I was good at it so I was like, “All right, this is great,” I have a secure job lined up, that’s what you’re supposed to do is go to college and get a good job and so it all just sort of made sense to me at the time.
And then what made you, I guess, feel or decide that you want to make a change? Did like this nutrition and wellness stuff call you or were you starting to like feel like you wanted something else?
To answer that, we’ll go back a little bit further than that. So before college, I had been experiencing depression from a traumatic breakup that I went through and, through that experience, I developed an eating disorder. And so, in college, I overcame that eating disorder and really shifted my mindset around food and nutrition, total 180, where I started to view food as fuel for my body. At the time, I had found CrossFit, which was really instrumental in sort of my own physical journey and wellness journey. And then, over the years, had just been super interested in learning more about how our body works and how the food that we eat impacts our performance, specifically, at the time, the gym, and then also sort of helping sort of myself with depression, making that connection of the food that we eat also impacts our mental health as well. And, from there, just been super passionate about it and, at the time, I think you start off your own journey just with an intention to help yourself and, over the years, I realized, my friends were coming to me to answer questions or they were sort of wanting to learn what kind of diet is Kaitlyn on now, all the different things that I was trying and doing, and really realized after a certain point that we look to our medical profession to help be our healthcare, it’s called the health care system, and I read a book by Dr. Mark Hyman that explained that, in fact, medical doctors here in the United States get very little training on nutrition and that was really when it clicked for me and the fact that I just felt a really big responsibility to take responsibility for myself for my own nutrition and my own health and really wanted to dive into it deeper and to help be that person for other people as well to be their wellness advisor that they can come to and answer, ask those questions and get help to what I like to call raise your health baseline so that you can feel better at everything you’re doing, including perform better at your job and be happier while you’re doing it as well.
So now that you work with clients as the wellness advisor, do you work with a lot of people who are in or have gone through similar situations that you’ve gone through?
Definitely. One of the situations people find themselves in most often is just eating what they think that they should eat and they’re not feeling how they think that they should feel. So, by that, I mean, we eat typical diet, it’s becoming more and more processed every day, we’re looking to just do what’s easy. We live in a modern time and we need convenience food and that’s just how our modern world is. And there’s nothing really wrong with that, except for when you get to how are you feeling on a daily basis. How are you sleeping? Are you really stressed? Do you have high levels of anxiety? For myself, I struggle with depression. When you start to realize that, oh, okay, something bigger in my environment, with all the things that we mentioned, the sleep, the stress, the food, they all impact how I feel on a daily basis and so it’s about sort of helping people acknowledge in their own situation, because it’s different for everyone, we all have bio-individual needs. At any given point in time, how can we get their body back in balance so that they can optimize their health?
And if someone’s in a really stressful situation, let’s say someone has to work two jobs to survive or they have a job that they really feel stuck in, really, really bringing them down, is it possible to help in some way by getting better nutrition or do a lot of these other ambient things such as I’m getting no sunlight, I’m getting terrible sleep, I have all sorts of stress, I am getting abused by my boss, which happens a lot, do those things actually need to change for anything to really get better?
You can definitely start where you are. There’s absolutely things that you can do, even if you don’t plan on or you’re not able to quit your job right away if that’s the situation that you’re in. There’s definitely things that we can work on to support your nutrition. There’s other ways to get vitamin D in sunlight, we can get really strategic with it. So, yeah, I would say definitely. I love working with busy professionals who are in this stressed state because there’s so many things that you can do to support the foundations that will help improve your overall health and, again, something will unfold. You’ll get to a breaking point where you’ll push and push and push but you’ll be able to do all the things that are within your control and it’ll be very clear to you what’s left to change in your life and those things that are out of your control, such as making a big decision as, “Should I leave this job?” that decision will be much more clear to you once you’ve sort of cleaned up your nutrition and your wellness enough to sort of calm the stressed state down.
And so what is the true connection, you’ve talked a little bit about this already, between changing your nutrition and changing your mindset? Because it seems like you said you need a little bit of a mindset change before you change your nutrition. Changing your nutrition can impact your mindset.
Start with an open mindset and go to what you’re most interested in doing right now. Share on XSo, if you’ve been feeling really drawn to try a specific type of diet, try it and see how you feel. If you’ve been really drawn to go to the gym and work out more and move your body, go do that. Just start. It’s not about, again, being 100 percent smooth and acing it or really rigid, it’s not about that, it’s just lean into what you’re feeling drawn to because it’s so interesting to me now to see almost every client I work with, once I give them sort of their full assessment of symptoms and bloodwork that we get into, it makes sense to them. They tell me, “This confirms sort of what I was feeling.” So we all inherently have this, you call it intuition, but just a sense of what do I need right now? What should I be doing to sort of help me feel better? And if you just start there with what you feel most drawn to or what you feel like you just queued your interest most recently, start there and start on the journey, and if you need help along the way, of course, there’s people like me who are here to help you, but everybody’s on their own journey and so it’s just about starting and it’s about starting with an open mindset. Like you mentioned, it’s a really cool sort of cascade of effects that happens where once you start on one thing and you sort of nail that or even if you’re still a little wobbly, you’re not totally acing the new habit, but you get the excitement, you get the interest in it and you’re like, “Okay, well, if that made me feel this way and I didn’t know I could feel that way, how will this other thing make me feel?” and it just sort of cascades from there.
And that’s a good segue I like to give all my guests as much as possible, a chance to give my listeners some information, Feel Good with Kait will be the best way if someone was interested in talking with you about your services, about the wellness consulting, about everything that we’ve talked about already on this podcast. What would be the best way someone could get a hold of you?
Yeah, you can find me on Instagram at Feel Great with Kait, that’s where I’m pretty active and like to share all the things that I’m into as well as feel free to reach out on LinkedIn as well and connect with me there at Kaitlin Borncamp.
Thank you very much. And then is there also a connection between the food that we intake into our body and what we intake into our mind being, say, what we’re reading, what we’re watching, the kind of people we’re around, the type of messaging that we’re receiving, and whether or not that messaging is empowering or disempowering?
100 percent. Yes, everything we consume is information to our body in one way or another.
And so, do these things need to be done in tandem or is it more likely to happen where if someone, say, starts taking in better nutrition into their body, they’re suddenly in this new habit and saying, “Well, I don’t wanna read this crap anymore, I don’t wanna listen to this stupid show anymore, it’s just like not what I need”?
Absolutely. I think you can start with one or the other, or, if you’re an overachiever like most people I know, you can start with both at the same time. But regardless of where you start, it’ll make you more sensitive to the other. So, by that, I mean, if you start to sort of notice what you’re putting in your body and how you feel, you will also be much more likely to notice the information that you’re consuming and how that makes you feel emotionally and mentally as well.
That’s awesome. And then your transition, so when you decided that you were going to move on from accounting to Feel Great with Kait, what inspired that other than kind of what people were coming to you asking you for tips about things? Was there an event or a situation that made you decide, okay, now is this time to move on, now is the time to kind of go and take on this as my full time endeavor?
I realized that the rising rates of disease in this country can be largely prevented and people are suffering on a regular basis when that’s really not necessary and I think that it’s all within our own responsibility. We each have a responsibility to take care of our own health and I think in our modern world today, we sort of get that confused. We’re a little bit too busy or too stressed, we’re not in tune with our bodies, those sorts of things, and it just sort of creates this commotion. We’re just going through life with this commotion of doing everything that we think we, quote-unquote, “should do,” live the life that we should do to have the job, to pay the bills, and do all the things. We’re totally out of tune with our body and I just am so inspired by people that are able to, like myself, make changes and really feel better and I want everyone to be able to feel that.
So it’s kind of just observing what you’re seeing around you and what we’re all seeing around us because it does feel like there’s something about modern society that’s a little bit out of balance with kind of like what you need to have like a full human experience, like the amount of time we spend just kind of cooped up in our homes in front of computers or in our cubicles and stuff like that, as well as a lot of things that people are missing. I know for most of the history of humanity, we spent way more time outside, we spent way more time in community. I believe that there’s even a movement, like the slow foods movement, around people just spending large chunks of their day just preparing a meal.
Wow, I haven’t heard of that. I’m going to have to check that out.
You talk about processed food and that’s what like a lot of this fast food is. What defines something as, quote-unquote, “processed food”?
That’s a good question. I define it as something taken out of its original form. So even something like olive oil is moderately processed because you’re not eating the whole olive, per se. But, again, something like olive oil is much healthier than something like canola oil and a lot of people don’t know this but canola oil is highly processed, there’s a lot of different machines and things that it has to go through for it to be denatured and then reconstituted in all these sort of, don’t quote me on some of the terms I’m using but it’s a much longer processing period. So, basically, it’s taking things apart or putting things from different things together to make a new thing that aren’t normally naturally found in nature.
The difference between white and brown rice is the easiest way for me to kind of wrap my brain around something like that.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly, and it also goes over to, on the spectrum of natural, less natural, there’s also unnatural, which I would call a synthetic, and that’s manmade and those are things such as some natural flavors are synthetic, a lot of the different compounds that are being added to food nowadays are synthetic, which basically just means that it’s not found in nature at all, it’s kind of made in a lab somewhere.
Like Velveeta?
Yeah. Like Velveeta.
Not to throw shade on one specific grocery store item but, I mean, it’s like it’s not cheese, right?
Right, exactly. Well, you know, American cheese isn’t cheese either.
Yeah, that’s why I remember hearing it’s like some other synthetic thing, right?
Yeah.
That’s another thing that I actually experienced in my own journey. American cheese is on this list of things that I remember a time that I used to actually enjoy eating. I remember a time I used to really like it. Same thing with this other food called Hot Pockets. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that. In college, it was so easy for me because you just heat it up for two minutes and it’s like right there and I used to go to the Walmart and buy six boxes at a time so I always had them in my dorm room and stuff like that. And now, I can’t even bring myself to eat one, to be 100 percent honest.
Yeah. And by that, do you mean it doesn’t taste very good to you?
My mouth doesn’t want it, for lack of a better way to put it.
Yeah, it’s not the same as it once was.
Yeah, and like this goes like my body’s gotten — I’ve somehow gotten used to eating different foods. Maybe I’m snobbier, I don’t know. I’m not claiming it’s all good stuff but…
Yeah. Well, I think that’s another example too of how your taste buds can change over time. Both sort of emotionally as to what you crave versus now what you’re kind of used to eating and what your taste buds are used to tasting and, yeah, your body evolves and that’s one thing I would say too, like we talked about, is people don’t anticipate that.
Think of any time in your life that you changed your mindset around something or that you do something now that comes easy and naturally to you that once was very hard to you and I would just encourage you to look at health and wellness in the same aspect.
And speaking of changing mindset around things, to go from being an accountant to being a wellness advisor, did you have to go through your own mindset change in order to get to where you are today?
Absolutely. I would say, when I first started off on my wellness journey myself, it was very much just for my own health and wellness and my own learnings and things and I think starting the certification process when I really decided I want to do something more than just be passionate about it and read all the books and things, I sought out certification to get more education on and, at the time, I told myself this will still just be for my own knowledge, it’ll still be for my own journey, which I think most people play safe. When they’re first starting off something new, they play safe. I told myself it’ll just be for this, it’ll just be for this. If I don’t use it for any other reason other than my own personal health, it’ll be okay. And then quickly realized that why did I believe that? The only reason I really believed that was because I was scared. I was afraid to change something in my current life. I was afraid to take radical responsibility and answer to my deepest desires of what’s within myself because it would mean that I would have to break some norms and it would mean that I would be putting myself up against judgment of myself and of my friends and family and going against what I think what you like to call the script, right?
Yeah. Yeah, living by the script.
Yeah, and that’s scary. It’s a scary place to be. Once you do enough mindset work to really get yourself to a point where anything’s possible, it’s freakin scary because then you realize anything’s really possible and it’s only up to you to make those things happen and you’re the only thing standing in your way.
That’s a beautiful transition. Did any of your fears about how people were going to respond to you, to go away from the safe full-time job to your business come to fruition or did people around you support you and say, “Wow, this is amazing”?
Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely scary in terms of judgment. In full transparency, I’m still sort of in process of transitioning full time into the business and I’m working with clients but everybody around you, I would say, is a mirror of what you’re most fearful of in yourself or what you’re most judgmental of in yourself and I do believe that the people around me want to see my success and so that’s been really encouraging to talk to them about. And I have found that my biggest fears and sort of apprehensions are things that are kind of just — I wouldn’t say made up in my head because some of them are very real fears that could happen, but when I talk them out loud to the people closest to me, they help me squash that really quickly with their support.
I love that statement, everyone around you and what they’re saying to you is a mirror of your biggest fears and could that also be like in a more positive sense? Like if you’ve kind of overcome your fears and you’re kind of more in the mindset of like, “Yeah, everything is possible. Yeah, I’m doing this and this is my mission,” do the people around you then become mirrors of that more positive message too?
I think so. Yeah.
That is amazing and I love to hear it and I wish you the best upon your journey and everything you’re trying to do because we do kind of live in a society that’s a little bit a little bit sick, in a way, not to put it very bluntly, but there are a lot of people out there that are unhealthy, unhealthy in the mind, unhealthy in the body, it’s kind of prevalent everywhere so I’m really glad that you and a lot of other people are out there trying to put a dent into that, make a difference to that and bring everyone back to health again.
Thank you.
And thank you so much for joining us today, Kaitlin, on Action’s Antidotes and sharing your story about how, first of all, we can make that connection between two things that seem unrelated to most people but you said so eloquently what the true similarity is between financial accounting and accounting for your health or kind of the system involved in your health, how there’s like so many inputs and a lot of things happening under the scene and how we go about measuring it and using habits to improve it and sharing your story about how you made that mindset shift and how you’re helping a lot of other people make a lot of mindset shifts to overcome the whole barrier of limitations on our willpower, which is what I think is stopping a lot of people from changing so many habits.
Definitely. Thanks for having me, Stephen.
And I’d like to also thank all the listeners out there and I hope you all tune in to more episodes of Action’s Antidotes and have a wonderful rest of your day and continue to work on yourselves and inspire others toward your journey.
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About Kaitlin Borncamp
Kaitlin Borncamp is a Certified Public Accountant and Nutritional Therapy Practitioner. Kaitlin Borncamp has over 10 years of experience in Public Accounting & Finance Consulting and over 5 years of experience as a Wellness Advisor. Kailtin overcame an eating disorder and completely shifted my mindset around food. She is an expert in nutrition and mindset coaching and loves helping busy professionals transform their health so that they can perform better at their job and have more confidence in their decisions surrounding their nutrition.