Kaitlin Borncamp realized she was living proof of taking health to the extreme. That wake up call led her to make a bold career pivot, becoming a certified nutritional therapy practitioner and founding her company, Feel Great with Kate, which I love the name, Feel Great with Kate. Now a nationally recognized wellness speaker and executive health coach, Kaitlin has worked with more than 4,000 professionals across Big Four firms, consulting teams, tech companies like Lyft, and organizations like the Colorado CPA Society. Her mission is to help high achievers stop trading their health for their wealth and to show professionals how their brain, the greatest asset, performs best when fueled by energy, focus, and sustainable habits. Kaitlin, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Hey, Randy. Thanks for having me here.

That is a pretty bold move, as we said in the intro, I think that’s not the normal career path going from working as a CPA in Big Four to becoming a certified nutritional therapy practitioner. Let’s start there. I normally would probably ask you to give us a little more background on yourself, but I’m too excited for this, let’s just jump into that. How did this not-normal transition surface itself? How did this become a thing? How did you decide, you know what, this is the next stage of who I want to be?

Yeah. It was after a lot of contemplation, and you’re exactly right. I get this question a lot because it is such a 180. And when I was exiting public accounting, the natural question everybody else is like, where are you going? And they’re expecting you to say another Big Four or industry, like a client, a really natural progression. And I’m like, no, I started my own business, and I’m going to become a health coach and speaker. And to many of us in the consulting space, we know nothing about that. We speak for a living, but you don’t really get paid to speak. 

So, yeah, it was at a point in time in my career where I felt like it was a decision point to recommit to the firm and go up for that next promotion, and I had been really interested and passionate about health for a while. I never once thought, Randy, that I would be an entrepreneur or start my business, let alone leave, you know, the great job of public accounting to be an entrepreneurial startup venture. It was after a lot of contemplation, there were a couple key things which we can unpack that led me to that decision. But ultimately it came down to being relatively young, not having kids yet, and really not wanting to live with regret and just jumping for it, jumping into the abyss. You do things like that on the cusp of the decision and you just, you kind of have to get your gumption about you and just go forward with it once you make the decision, because you’re like, oh man, I can’t think about it too long. I might second guess myself. 

And through the exit interview process, I was fortunate enough, I had so many good contacts over the 10 years I’d been with the firm and I tried to do my best to meet with as many of the people as I could to tell them the news. And there were a couple people that caught me off guard, a couple times I got the word, wow, you’re so brave. And I’m like, what do you mean brave? And now two years later, I know exactly what they mean. It is a very brave decision for sure.

Yeah. I think entrepreneurs in general, so you said you didn’t expect to be an entrepreneur, that wasn’t your mindset, but entrepreneurs, what I see, the ones who really don’t see that risk, which, you know, when you say, oh, I didn’t realize I was being brave, that’s you not seeing risk, that’s you seeing an opportunity, that’s you seeing in my mind the passion, what you wanted to do. This is where you wanted to be, and I think that’s really what creates an entrepreneur. So I applaud you for being blind to the potential risk that this had for you.

Yeah, for sure.

So let’s talk about, because you said we can unpack some things. So this obviously wasn’t a, hey, I’m working, I don’t even know, let’s say you’re working 80 hours a week. Hopefully not. But they may have been that, especially in Big Four public accounting, and then a light bulb went off and you said, no, I’m going to be a nutritional therapist. There had to be something that led up to it. There had to be something that is like, okay, I need to be better. I need to be healthier. I need to have more energy. I don’t know if burnout was part of it. So maybe impact a little more of that journey to get to that point and how potentially accounting impacted that.

Yeah, definitely. I think there’s kind of two main areas. I’ll go into the first one around my own personal health journey, which was definitely a journey. My passion for nutrition really started a decade prior when I was still in college, and I had actually experienced a lot of unhealthy eating patterns, I was experiencing an eating disorder. And then I had found calorie counting, I thought I was healthier. Then I found macro counting, I thought I was even healthier. I found CrossFit. I thought I was the healthiest possible, and I was so wrong. And what I started to learn through that process is that you can be really unhealthy and still look healthy and nobody will ever know. And I actually, I thought I was kind of the only one, but over the last 10 years or so, just talking to people about their nutrition and their health, more often than not, people actually tell me, especially women, that they also have experienced an eating disorder of some sort. So it’s really common. But what it led me to realize is just my deep passion for the body and what our body is always doing at all given times without us even recognizing it. 

And a couple things along the way that really shifted my mindset. One of those was learning from Dr. Mark Hyman, he’s an MD. He had said that most doctors in America have zero to one classes in nutrition. Not degrees or anything like that; classes. And so, believe it or not, when I graduated with my bachelor’s in accounting, I had more nutrition training than most doctors in America because I took one nutrition class.

Crazy.

It’s crazy, yeah, it’s absolutely insane. And so that really busted it open for me to stop so much relying on our healthcare system as a true healthcare system. And again, we need it, we need all the support and the medical professionals that are there, but we really need to call it what it is, and it really is more there for when we need surgeries and reactive, and things like that. But the second thing was, I was busy working in my career. I started off in tax accounting and then I had switched over to finance consulting a couple years in. And at that time I was definitely experiencing burnout. I really hadn’t quite clicked it together. I didn’t know very much about the body. I knew a little bit more about nutrition, and I had started having much healthier eating habits. I stopped doing CrossFit, my body started feeling better. But I remember learning about mental health and we talked so much about mental health and physical health as if they’re two separate things, and that couldn’t be further from the truth, from a body and a health perspective.

The next thing that kind of pieced the puzzle for me was learning from Dr. Daniel Amen, he’s a leading psychiatrist here in the States, and he had said psychiatrists are one of the only doctors that don’t scan the underlying organ that they treat, which is the brain. And that really got me thinking, yeah, just how much, being in professional services, like I wasn’t as a CPA. Everybody listening probably resonates with this. We don’t do manual labor. You’re sitting at a desk, you’re doing a lot of critical thinking, you’re doing a lot of analytical work. That’s why your clients are paying you, they’re paying you to read up on the laws and regulations and to be one step ahead so that you can make their life easier and handle all the things, right? And so what that means is that your brain is your biggest asset when it comes to being a CPA. 

And so that journey transpired over many years, much of which when I was still comfortable in my career as a CPA. But then, within COVID, it was really kind of a wake up call for myself, where prior to that I’d been traveling every week as a finance consultant, and I was just getting kind of drained as you do, being on the road literally every week. And so once the world started to slow down, six months, a year in, and we kind of realized, okay, this is going to be the new way of the world for a little while, it really made me pause and kind of think about, do I want to go into the nutrition space or the health space a little bit deeper? And so that’s when I decided to seek out a certification in nutrition. 

Of course, at that time it was just for me, I’m a lifelong learner. I love learning. I remember one of my favorite parts of college was just that you just get to show up and learn, and I was missing that in my career, because in your career, of course, as a CPA, you very much have all the on the job training, you have to kind of keep up on your own learning and ask for help. So anyway, that’s when I decided to go out and get certified as a nutritional therapy practitioner. And then, after a couple years, I decided it was time to, like I said, jump, jump over and make the shift in the career path there.

Okay. So a couple things that you said: One, I want to dig deeper into that brain is your biggest asset, but before we get there, you had mentioned that you personally were showing signs or dealing with burnout. For you, obviously that was an area where you realized change had to be made. Was this a long timeframe where it’s like, okay, I don’t know what’s going on, I’m just tired, I’m getting cynical, or how was burnout manifesting itself for you?

Yeah, for me, I really recognized it after one particular busy season while I was still working in tax. And it was around April or May timeframe when the filing season extensions were just filed for a client that I had that was filing over a hundred state returns. And also if you know, in public accounting, your first busy season as a tax accountant is really more of your audit busy season, so we’d just gotten done with all the tax provisions and auditing those. And I remember talking to a colleague and it just kind of hit me where I was like, I was so, like you said, yes, I was experiencing a lot of pessimism and low energy and just not wanting to do the work. And it just sort of hit me in the sense that nobody ever lied to me about what the job would be. When you go through recruiting, especially in the Big Four, they’re telling you there’s going to be busy seasons, it’s going to be a lot of work, but there’s also ample reward. You’re getting higher than market average raises. You’re getting tons of great benefits. You’re getting really good experience. So it’s not for nothing, but it was a good realization I had because it just made me realize that I was no longer lit up by the work I was doing and for me to be annoyed by them asking me to do the job that they hired me for was my signal to go out and try something new, and so it was at that time when I made the transition into finance consulting. 

Well see, you were much better than me. It took me years to realize that my tiredness and my cynicism was burnout. I probably didn’t even know that word until the last five years. So I applaud you for recognizing that change was needed earlier in the career. And let’s then transition to what I was saying earlier, or what you said earlier that I wanted to expand on. Burnout, the way that we, I think I talk about us as accountants, CPAs, EAs, bookkeepers, whatever, I think it’s just a personality trait where we just see the work we need to do, we see the people we need to help, which is our clients, and we don’t see ourselves. 

And so one of the things is that when we go work these crazy hours, your brain is just not as effective. I mean, you become a lot less effective. And you just said brain is your biggest asset, and I don’t think we spend enough time taking care of our brains. Is there advice that you give people, like, okay, here’s how you need to be better at managing your time so that you have the energy you need to get the work done and be efficient, or what do you say—this is a long question! What do you say leaders need to do, or managers need to do to help, you know, people take care of their brains? 

Great question, and it needs to be talked about more in the CPA space and in the professional services space for sure, so I appreciate you asking it. There’s a couple things that I definitely recommend coming from it as a first person perspective, what can I do? So for the CPAs listening, this is directly for you and what you can do for your brain is a couple things: One would be start to manage your blood sugar. Eat more protein and eat high quality fat because it’s just proven, I like to call unbalanced blood sugar a canary in the coal mine because it’s now becoming such a high propensity of seemingly “healthy” people getting told by their doctor that they have prediabetes, and this is so common. I hear it from people who are like, I run five times a week, or I know I’m nailing it in the gym, I’m working out five or six days a week, but my doctor just told me I had pre-diabetes. What is going on? A lot of it is going to be nutrition. A huge portion of it’s probably going to be unmanaged stress. So if you can learn to manage your blood sugar, it will help give your brain the proper fuel that it needs. 

And also coming off of that, a lot of people have misinformation around what ample fuel sources our brain needs, and what it needs to create a healthy functioning brain. One of those, namely, is high quality fat. And so, coming off of the 80s and the 90s where we were all told to eat low fat and avoid fat like the plague, it’s actually the opposite, which is if you want to age well, if you want to be performing well, and even just thinking about it after your career, if you want to still have some brain capacity left to your ripe old age to be there for your kids, which is the reason why you’re working so hard for your career, likely you need to be supporting your brain health now. There’s a reason why Alzheimer’s is being called type three diabetes.

Oh, I didn’t know that. Alright, so here’s my question for you now. I’m going to hire you as my nutrition coach for this section here. So here’s today, I’m going to talk about my fats, so we’ll see if I did okay. So I did have over two different meals, a whole avocado. Is that healthy fats?

Yes.

Okay, I’m one for one. I had, as a snack, a handful of mixed nuts. We good so far?

Yep, those are good.

Okay. And then that’s probably the extent of my, well, I had an egg for breakfast. There is obviously fat in there. And is that healthy or are we good to…

Yeah, and have more than one.

Okay.

You know, as a small female for my breakfast, if I’m just eating eggs, I don’t know if that’s all you ate. I would eat three or four eggs.

Okay. I had one egg with a half an avocado and a slice of, it’s comparable to whatever that Dave’s bread, and so it’s the whatever the high whole grain, “seedtastic.” So, not bad on my fats today. All right. Now we can go back to the regularly scheduled show. Now that we know that I did okay so far today.

Yeah. And a good test to use too, Randy, is how do you feel? Do you recognize that you’re hungry within an hour or two after eating that breakfast or that meal? That means you’re probably not eating enough and/or it’s causing you a large blood sugar spike and then subsequent dip. And also, how is your focus ability and your brain functioning? It’s so interesting. I think there’s a huge field of nutrition, of course, related to performance nutrition, right? Like when you’re training for a marathon or when you’re more of an actual athlete, and you really want to gear up for an event. And I want to invite the idea that if our brain really is the biggest asset, which it is, we need to be gearing up for specific meetings and days. It’s much like a big athletic event, because you’re going to need it. 

And so one of the biggest areas that I see people having issues with, particularly CPAs, is the unbalanced blood sugar, like I said. But if I may, just continuing to answer that part of the question, what leaders and managers can do to help support that is getting more into the work culture element of it and enabling—I like to call this using professional discernment and the power of silent permission. And I’ll kind of unpack what both of those two terms are. 

Professional discernment is you want to have healthy boundaries as a CPA, but you know that you work in a client serving industry, you have responsibilities to be a certain level of responsiveness to your client or to your partners, or to your team, depending on what’s coming up, so that’s up to you. It’s your responsibility as a professional to know what level are you at right now. Are you working up to an IRS deadline, an SEC deadline, or a client go live deadline, that you need to be really responsive. Maybe your partner expects you to be on teams almost 24/7. That may be a short term expectation.

Contrast that with hopefully some of the Fridays in the summer, maybe you’re taking those off or there’s no meeting Fridays, that’s an unspoken rule for teams, things like that. So you need to know what the relevant deadlines are and when your responsiveness is required or not, and then also having the right level of professionalism when you communicate your boundaries. And I’ve done this badly and I’ve seen other people do it badly, so you learn. You do learn. But what I mean by that is over communicating what you are doing and when you will or won’t be available. You might think, I know a lot of consultants, they block off their workout on their schedule in the morning, which is totally fine. If you need to get to that point because you’re working with teams and companies and clients in different time zones, especially different continents, definitely encourage you to block it off on your calendar, like your morning workout. I encourage everyone to block out your lunch because it’s no one else’s responsibility to know when your lunch hour is or when you are eating, but you need to do it in a professional manner. By that I mean if you’re working towards a busy season, you probably can’t have your workout blocked off until 9:00 AM. I don’t know. Is that okay with your team? Is that okay with your manager or your partner? You need to ask if you’re not having those conversations. 

I like to give the baseline of no matter what the time of year, everyone needs to block off a minimum of 30 minutes for lunch. I don’t care. You can come talk to me and hound me later, but I will help you find 30 minutes in your schedule, and a huge reason for that is because we’re stress eating or we’re not eating anything, and that’s leading to really low quality choices for nutrition.

Yeah, I like that. Blocking off your lunch and doing it away from your desk so there’s no distractions. Because two things, one, as we were just talking, probably easier to concentrate on that healthy eating when you’re not stress eating. And two, that’s just a time for your brain to recharge too. I mean, just whatever. Right? And for me, I’ll do a crossword puzzle at lunch or something. It’s just walk everything else. I get back to the desk as long as I eat my healthy fats, and probably eat a decent amount of protein, I come back and I’m, I assume decent amount of protein is a good call on there. 

Yeah.

I’m good to go then. So I’m all on board. The other thing that I’ve learned from others is just talking about, I mean, if we’re talking about stress and where unhealthy eating can come into, is just really scheduling out your time for when you do have the high energy, and concentrate on doing the projects that take the most brainpower at that time, and what it sounds like is having a good, healthy meal before that is going to help you to do that as well.

Likewise! Test it out and see what works for you. I know some people report having higher energy early mornings when they’re fasting. I’m learning more about fasting safely as a woman myself. But again, try things out and see what works for you. And if you’re currently experiencing fatigue, low energy, or if you’ve gotten to that point of burnout, it’s time to change, and increasing fats and protein for your breakfast is a really good place to start. 

But I also wanted to bring it back to the point from earlier, on silent permission. This is such a powerful way that companies and leaders themselves can have an impact on their team very easily. And the concept of silent permission goes like this: When you take care of yourself, you’re giving other people silent permission to take care of themselves. Of course, it’s always under the assumption that you’re meeting your expectations as a client serving professional, we covered that already. But it’s really so powerful. And one of my clients last year I was working with, who’s a senior manager in audit, and he was telling me his goal was around weight loss and energy, and he’s like, Kaitlin, I really don’t want to drink, but we have our upcoming team celebration because our client’s filing their 10K. I said, okay, so we chatted through, what do you want to do? And he’s like, I think I might be comfortable just ordering the first glass of wine when everybody’s ordering their first drink, but I’m not really going to plan to drink it. And he did that and afterwards he reported back and said, how’d it go? He said it went really well. I ordered the drink just like I said I would, but it actually got us talking on the conversation of alcohol. I come to find out, a lot of my other team members also were trying not to drink as much alcohol right now. And so what that enabled him to do was to kind of lead the way and be an example for his team members and to make other people feel more comfortable, and come to find out most people are feeling the exact same way. 

So it’s really interesting that, I’m biased because I’m a CPA as well, but I think what’s unique about CPAs is that there comes this fortitude and with this internal drive you were talking about before. And I think with that, on the topic of health, most people want to be healthy. They genuinely want to learn what’s good for their body. They want to do their best. We’re all perfectionists, or as I like to call myself, a recovering perfectionist, so we want to do it well, we want to do a good job when it comes to our health habits too. And so the more that you can start to embody that and do it well just for yourself, other people will start to take notice, like you said, go have lunch away from your desk, go for a short walk. Turn a meeting into a walking meeting. I wouldn’t obviously do that for a client or an executive report out meeting, of course. Again, that’s the discernment. But if it’s just a catch up between you and your direct report or your morning team meeting, just internal, go ahead and turn that into a walking meeting. One of my favorite things to do is to send a little snip right before a meeting and say, hey, I’m going to take this as a walking meeting, feel free to do the same, and you’d be surprised at how many people take you up on that.

Yeah, I schedule walks just because my wife and I’m on the road a lot, but when I’m home, we have on our calendars 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM. We just go out for a 15, 20 minute walk. I don’t take any meetings because that would be rude not to talk to her on that walk, I think. But I like the idea of being out, walking around, just getting on a check-in call and you get a couple things from that. You’re clearing your mind from the desk. You’re not sitting there, you’re getting up, you’re getting exercise and getting some fresh air. 

Alright, so I find this intriguing. Anything when we’re talking about health, you know, you said earlier, it’s mental health, physical health kind of all go together and I completely agree with that. I think you’re familiar with our conference, Bridging the Gap, and Bridging the Gap’s major theme is all about mental and physical health, that’s the overriding theme. And so our discussion here today obviously ties in with the things that I’m passionate about, but this isn’t just us talking. This is what you do now. I mean, we talked about Feel Great with Kate. Give us more information on that. And, you know, you’re out speaking at events, you’re out hosting workshops. Just let me know what you’re doing and the impacts that’s having.

Yeah. A couple ways I like to work with teams and leaders as well is through wellness workshops, through public accounting firms, but also other companies as well. And the impacts it’s having has been one, it’s really fun for the group. So I find that we’re able to have a workshop centered around a wellness topic, which I’ll get into, but it’s also usually eligible for CPE learning credit, and so I find that it’s highly engaging and more heavily attended than most other CPE sessions just because it’s non-technical, so you’re able to get that benefit as well. But on the impact portion of it, they’re highly relevant topics. One of the main ones I talk on is called “Eating for Energy,” and it goes over how do you actually balance your blood sugar for energy? How do you nail your nutrition as a busy professional? Another one that’s been really impactful is “Unlocking Peak Performance,” and it’s around talking about routines that you can do to set yourself up for success beyond nutrition. 

The thing that I’ve noticed now is that after doing this with many teams in many different companies, it really has a couple different layers of impact. One is the information I’m giving. They’re getting really high quality information on the CPA, walked in their shoes so they know it’s actually relevant. That’s one of the points of feedback I’ve gotten, as opposed to maybe some prior other wellness workshops. The company or the conference has had great information, but it’s coming from someone who hasn’t lived the client serving nature and that demanding essence of the job. But another layer of impact that these workshops have for teams is creating the culture of wellbeing, and it’s a really good opportunity for leaders to walk the walk. I know a lot of public accounting firms have a really great list of HR resources, which is phenomenal. But at the end of the day, you and I both express that we’ve experienced burnout in our career, and another link on the benefits page isn’t going to help me have less burnout. We need to actually see it coming from our managers, we need to see it coming from our partners. 

And I gotta tell you what, having some of the workshops now where I give the partners an opportunity to speak up and share, how do they manage this part of their wellness routine, or one of them I did, they were bold enough to share, when was a time in their career where their wellness routine actually they were sacrificing it, and how did that negatively impact themselves and their life and their family life, and just being real. And that’s what people really want. And I’ll tell you what, you’ll get such a better engagement from your team after a session like this, because it really does go a long way to walk the walk.

Yeah, that’s great. What you just made me realize in that discussion there is that I think we do a pretty good job at promoting health and boundaries and taking care of yourself and everything at our company, but I’m going to reach out to our HR department after this, because we’re going to have an event in San Antonio in December, and I think we could use a session like this for our internal company meeting. So, Kaitlin, this has been amazing. I love hearing what you’re doing. I love the transition you made from obviously the normal transition from accounting to wellness that everybody makes, but that’s been great. Before I ask you a couple final questions, I know there was one thing you had an offer you wanted to tell everybody about, so why don’t you expand on that?

Yeah, thanks, Randy. So, in my time now of working with many teams and professionals, I always like to ask, what’s the number one thing that gets in your way of taking care of yourself and prevents you from eating well? And without a doubt, the number one answer I hear from CPAs is lack of time and competing priorities. And so again, they have this goal to eat well and they know they want to, but they just feel like they have so many things vying for their time. And so from that was born this idea, this new offer I’m creating, it’s going to be one of the most value packed things. It’s called the “No-Time Nutrition Blueprint.” It’s for any busy professional to nail your nutrition in no time. And it’s honestly using all the principles I use to maintain my lifestyle and my physique now, being able to maintain sub 20% body fat year round and not having to diet when you’re going on a vacation. But it really is so much value, I’m basically giving it away. It’s $27, so be sure to check that out if you are a professional, a CPA who needs to be eating better and you want to, but you just feel like you don’t have enough time. So that’s for you.

No, I appreciate that. And then two final things. We talked about making time for yourself and we talked about boundaries and all these other things and how accountants just get too focused on helping others all the time. So for me personally, we run a survey in the profession, just kind of figures out satisfaction levels. And one of the highest levels of satisfaction creator is when the people you work with know your outside the work passions. And so that’s my question for you: When you’re not helping others have a healthier life, what do you enjoy doing outside of work?

I love that. I enjoy doing pickleball, playing pickleball and reading. Those are two of my passions for sure.

Pickleball, I have not played yet. But I’ve actually got to the point where I, like, we have a pretty big piece of land here in our new house. I’m like, I should build a pickleball court in my yard, and I haven’t played yet, so I should probably go out and play. But it looks like a lot of fun.

It’s a ton of fun. Good for your joint health too.

Yeah. Well even somebody with dual knee replacements like me, I heard can play. So the fact I can’t play basketball anymore is not good for my mental health, so I’ve got replace it with something. So I think pickleball will be that. Alright. Pickleball and reading. So reading, are we reading like fiction, self-help, everything? What’s your favorite?

It’s all nonfiction. I had one friend ask me one time, she’s like, don’t you like to read for fun? I’m like, I am reading for fun. There are so many books I have on my list to read. I alternate between Audible and hard copy, depending on what kind of book it is. But a lot of health, a lot of nutrition, and a lot of personal development as well. 

That’s cool. I’ve got into that a lot more lately. Forever, it was just all fiction for me, which I love reading fiction, although lately for me it’s been Audible too. It’s just, I can’t get out of the Audible habit right now. And I like reading. But one of the ones that I just finished, somebody at our conference told me about it, and I think the author was Arthur C. Brooks. It was called From Strength to Strength. It just has me intrigued and it talks about different levels of your career and when you have the most technical knowledge, but then there becomes a time where you become more of a, you’re better suited for teaching and mentoring and sharing knowledge, and just that whole transition I find intriguing. So any recent books that you would recommend?

Oh man, put me on the spot. Yeah, there’s one I started reading, it’s called Wired to Eat by Robb Wolf. And that’s been really interesting around how we evolved as humans to eat. And like I was saying before, the number one thing we need to do is balance our blood sugar, and so our propensity to gain weight and have all these metabolic diseases actually is an adaptive response that our ancestors who had those same responses were able to survive. And so it really puts it into a new light that I really find interesting.

Okay, that’s cool. Alright, then last question: People want to find out more, they want to take advantage of your offer, they want to find out more about you, they want to connect with you. Where are the places they should look?

Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn, Kaitlin Borncamp, and then also go to my website for all the offers: FeelGreatWithKate.com.

Great, and we’ll have links in the show notes. So, Kaitlin, again, thank you so much for being here today. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing what you’re doing and hearing your story and hearing how you’re helping others lead better lives.

Thanks, Randy. Great to be here.