#62: Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable to Get Comfortable

62. Getting Comfortable with Uncomfortable to Getting Comfortable

Do you feel like being able to lose the weight and keeping it off is just one of those things that you’ll just never figure out? And you’re just gonna have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable in your body. Well, guess what? You don’t. I’m Dara Tomasson and this is Love Yourself Thin podcast, episode 62, getting comfortable with uncomfortable to getting comfortable.

All right. Doesn’t that sound like a fun name for your podcast. As you know, I love thinking about all these podcast names and I love being able to prepare them for you. And so today’s podcast, I’m gonna teach you how to be good with being uncomfortable. Are you ready? So before we dive in, I’m going to share, a win from one of my clients.

So in the month of August, I challenged the ladies in Love yourself thin and myself to exercise every. And actually, when I say exercise, that’s like a stretch to go for a walk every day. And when I say, go for a walk I’m, I didn’t say you had to wear running shoes and you didn’t have to wear a sports bra. You didn’t have to wear a stretch of pants.

Like most of the walks that I did in the month of August, myself were in my Bienstock in my regular clothes, because I honestly, I don’t want to have to exercise to lose weight and because, that’s what I’ve done for four years, but I also don’t I wanna like ease myself in my body does like sweating. My body does like moving that fast, but I also don’t want to add that extra layer of I’m gonna go walking every day. Plus I need to put on all these extra clothes and then have a shower and all that. Like I just, I just let that all go. And so I have been going in my regular clothes with my Birkenstock and just enjoying and sometimes my heartbeat gets up and sometimes it doesn’t and it’s no big deal.

Anyways, I’m shouting out one of my clients because she went out every single day and despite getting COVID and crazy hot weather, she did it. She learned that she can honor herself. She also realized that she didn’t need to walk five miles every day with full running gear, kind of like me. But what she realized is that she can build trust with herself. And what is, which really is the first step to self confidence. So I was so happy to see her doing that. 

Okay. So this podcast actually stemmed from a coaching call that I had with one of my clients who has been working with me. She started one on one, and she’s basically been in everything that I’ve, that I’ve done. And she has lost 50 pounds and she’s really thrilled about it, but she has another 50 pounds that she still wants to lose. And so she’s been able to keep off the 50 pounds and maintain that for pretty much a year. 

And so we were doing some coaching and she was getting really frustrated. And, uh, so I asked her, I said, why is it important for you to lose the last 50 pounds? Cause you’ve already lost 50 pounds. I mean, that’s, that’s substantial. And she said it’s because she wants to feel proud of herself. And no, not only does she wanna feel proud of herself, but she wants weight loss to be automatic.

She wants it just to be like breathing or blinking, just, just like that. And so as I dug a little bit deeper in her coaching, she realized that she was becoming, she was going to excuses. She was rebelling from her, her own protocol, like she knows how to lose 50 pounds. She’s already done it, but she was rebelling from it.

And the big thing is I dug a little bit deeper and a little deeper. What we really saw was she was avoiding sadness and loneliness. So when you avoid sadness and loneliness, it looks like you’re rebelling. It looks like you are doing these other things. And ultimately she’s not taking full responsibility for her own feelings.

And so one of the, the things I coached her on is if she could just sit, like I said, why don’t you go on a road trip? Why don’t you just spend some time, like plan to spend some time with that feeling of sadness and loneliness and just allow it in your body. And when you do that, what happens is now you have freedom because just like to have a balanced, being a balanced human, you have to have negative and positive.

So if she can sit with sadness, guess what that means? She fully gets to sit with happiness. If she sits with loneliness, she can fully sit with not being lonely. Right. She can have those other emotions. And so as I share this with you, I want you to think about what is the reason why you would wanna lose weight?

Like, what is that emotion? What is that pot of gold emotion that you wanna have? And if you don’t allow yourself to feel the opposite of that emotion, then guess what? You’re not going to have that experience for yourself. It’s a bummer. Right? And so one of the ways I’ve described this and I know this is super helpful is that I describe it in, um, the same way as brushing your teeth

So when you brush your teeth, you don’t just brush your teeth and say, yep, I did it. It’s done. No, you need to always be brushing your teeth. In fact, even if you brush your teeth really well the day before, even if you did like the best job, like you flossed and you, you did all the things, it doesn’t mean you don’t have to brush your teeth the next day or even in a couple of hours, because the rule is we have teeth and there’s plaque and plaque builds on your teeth every time you eat, even if you don’t eat like overnight, you, we have, well, I have, I’m a mom of 5 kids, so I used to call ’em sugar bugs. Right. And so when you eat food or even with saliva, just with all of that moisture in your mouth, That creates sugar bugs that creates, um, bacteria, all of that, that will sit on your teeth. And when it sits on your teeth it can actively like work on your enamel and break it down. And so in order to conquer that you gotta brush your teeth. 

So there’s another way of looking at that. So you, I don’t know how many you of, you know about beavers, but, you know, I am Canadian and beaver is like one of our animals that we are super proud of uh, just like with Americans and their Eagle. So beavers their teeth if the beaver doesn’t keep chewing on things. Their teeth will just keep growing. And then what happens is if they don’t take, if they don’t wear them down, their teeth will actually, they could kill them because they just keep growing and your teeth can only get so long and then they’re like immobilized. So a beaver has to continually be biting on things in order to be healthy. And human teeth we have to continually be washing them and taking care of them and flossing them. And, and when we do that, We can have healthy teeth.

And with weight loss, if you don’t get into your brain, you’re not gonna be successful because you’re, otherwise you’re gonna feel, um, overwhelmed. You’re gonna feel annoyed. You’re gonna have all these other emotions and then you’re not gonna be, you’re not gonna be okay with yourself. Okay. So it’s a continual process. We have emotions. They come and they go and we need to, an emotion is just vibrations in our body and we just allow them to be there. And when we allow them to be there, then we can have a balance. We can have that 50 50. 

So when my client said that she wants weight loss to be innate or second nature, this happens when you allow yourself the range of emotions and being willing to sit with a discomfort that 50% of you life is going to have uncomfortable emotions and 50% will have wonderful emotions.

And so when you think about this concept of being getting comfortable with uncomfortable, to getting comfortable, it really is this idea of, okay, in order to be a healthy, balanced human 50% of my day has to be uncomfortable. Now, let me just do a caveat here for you because somebody be like, wow, that sounds super terrible dara. So I’m gonna give you an example. So, and I give this example, so I might have given it already, but, you know, reminders are really helpful. 

I don’t know if any of you struggle with this whole password thing, but passwords are kind of annoying. And now that I have a team of people who work with me. They have to have access to my passwords. And then they, so we have this whole like password thing and it’s like this thing, and right now we’re gonna start a new thing with last pass and all of that, but it’s been a thing. And in the past before love yourself thin and before I learn life coaching tools, If I was having a day and like all of a sudden I tried to do a job and then I had to do a job to, to if I forgot the password.

So now I, I would just explode. I’d be like, no way. Now I have to go find that other password and what’s that password. And I would just go on this tangent about passwords. And the next thing I know I was eating chocolate chips down in the kitchen because it was like, it just seemed like so overwhelming and so overbearing and so annoying and so distracting.

And now, and it used to take sometimes a forgotten password. I would go on a tangent for 15, 20, 30 minutes down in the kitchen with chocolate chips. And now I forget a password and I, within five to 10 seconds, I’m not even kidding you. I’m like, oh, forgot password. I go in, I find the new one, no big deal. It really, isn’t a big deal. And so now, so the, there is the negative, right? The negative of like, oh, that’s annoying. I don’t have that password, but I just allow that negative in me. I allow the annoying feeling annoying, and then I’m able to solve it. Moving on. I I’ve now regained 15 to 20 minutes and I’m not breaking trust with myself because I’m not going to eat all the chocolate chips.

So that’s what I mean, I still have the negative, but I don’t react. That’s what I say about avoid, resist or react to it. I’m just like, there it is. This is, this is part of the rules of being a human. And so when I know that I can feel like I have arrived, that’s what my client wanted, because I’m, I know that I have this freedom, because freedom is me just allowing 50% negative and allowing 50% positive. So when I allow it, that brings, it becomes more innate. It becomes second nature being calm, knowing everything is figureoutable. All of that is just so much more powerful. 

Okay. The I’m gonna give one more analogy and then it’ll be the end of the podcast. So this last analogy is about driving. Okay. So my third son just got his beginner’s license in August and we’re teaching him to drive. Now, bring yourself back. I don’t know if you drive or not, but, or you could even use the example of like zoom calls, right? Like the beginning of COVID. But I don’t even know how many of you like never was on a zoom call and now it just feels like zoom is just like what you do now. It’s just like second nature. 

But the first time you did a zoom call for, I’m just gonna give an example of my son. So, because I’ve had two other kids that I’ve taught to drive and so everything at the beginning is super uncomfortable. And so I say to them, it’s going to be uncomfortable. I mean, and the thing is my this kid has been driving in a car since the day he was born, but now he’s actually driving the car. And so even though he was comfortable being in the car, now he has to be uncomfortable, learning he to drive, but he knows that eventually he’s gonna become really comfortable with this. 

And so when you can embrace like, yep, this is gonna be uncomfortable. Yep. I’m not gonna enjoy this first part. And don’t make a big deal of it. Okay. I’m learning how to hand applicate. And at the live event at retreat, I’m gonna do more of it and I’m gonna get more help and more support. I’m gonna sit beside Lisa Bond Jean, the master of all of it, and she’s gonna help me some more and I’m just gonna get, I’m gonna be uncomfortable. I’m gonna get comfortable with being bad at doing it because I know that the more I do it and the more help I get, it’s just gonna become second nature. It’s gonna become really comfortable. 

Okay. So I gave some examples. I really want to hear what you have to say about this podcast, because the truth of the matter is being a human we’ve always had this process. We were, we had to accept that we weren’t gonna be good at doing something. And then we did something and then we got good at. And so with weight loss, there’s a lot of judgment. There’s a lot of fear of judgment, um, all of that. And so it’s been really uncomfortable and that’s okay. 

We can be uncomfortable. We can get comfortable with being uncomfortable. So I love this podcast. I love this for you. Embrace all of it. This is how you get freedom, people. Isn’t that so much fun? I will see you next week.