Keep Moving Forward: Getting Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

In this week's episode we discuss how sustainable change happens outside your comfort zone. Learn some tips and strategies to help you get comfortable being uncomfortable. 

Transcript

  📍 Welcome back to the Keep Moving Forward podcast, your weekly dose of real talk about weight loss, personal transformation, and the mindset shifts that help us show up, stay consistent, and stop living in the past tense. I'm your host, Eric, AKA, the used two guy. And today we're going to get into something that sounds a little unpleasant.

We're gonna talk about getting comfortable, being uncomfortable. This concept, this mindset, if you will, has been the most powerful part of my personal transformation, and I think it's something we all need to think about more, especially in a world that constantly pushes comfort, convenience, and ease.

Let's start with what I call the myth of comfortable progress. Have you ever caught yourself saying something like. I am too busy to stick with anything. I just need to find something that works with my schedule or I'll start when it's more convenient. I know I've used excuses like these many times in my life, and I'm sure you have as well, but here's the hard truth, and it's taken me a while to learn this along the way.

Growth doesn't happen in comfort. It lives in the uncomfortable choices. The early mornings, the skipped happy hours, the sweaty workouts when you could be sitting on the couch. The days you stick to your diet plan, when you'd rather just give up and start again on Monday. Progress, real lasting progress comes from pushing through discomfort.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about grinding yourself into the ground or ignoring rest and balance. I'm not talking about hustle culture. What I'm talking about is building resilience through discomfort. I'm talking about being honest with yourself, which can be one of the most uncomfortable things in the world.

I am talking about learning to sit with hard things that take you outside your comfort zone and work to build the ability to stay the course. Anyway, let me talk to you about my personal turning point. I had a good job, a great family, but inwardly.

I was struggling. I felt stuck, ashamed, and tired, both physically and emotionally. I had built a life around habits that brought short-term comfort, eating whatever I wanted, avoiding an ever-growing list of physical challenges, and not talking about my health or going to the doctor because I didn't wanna see the number on the scale or hear how high my blood pressure and cholesterol were.

And ironically, all of those comfortable things. Had actually made daily living way more uncomfortable. But here's the thing, I wasn't just uncomfortable with my weight. I was also uncomfortable with the idea of change. Changing those patterns meant facing the kind of discomfort I'd been avoiding for years.

If you were to ask me the single thing that made it possible for me to make those first steps on this journey, it's this. I had to be able to accept the most uncomfortable truths of all, and that meant being truly honest with myself and finding a way to do it without judgment or shame. It meant accepting where I was and knowing that if I could just keep making steady, slow progress, I would get where I wanted.

It meant accepting that frustrations and setbacks were all part of the process and not a sign that I was doing something wrong. Let me give you some examples. The first day when I walked across my house from my office and I stepped on the scale in my bathroom, I saw 3 0 1 pop up, and I was uncomfortable for sure, but I also felt a bit of relief because I at least knew where I was starting from.

And in that moment I believed things could get better. A year later, the first time I went out for a jog after almost 20 years, and I did a sort of half run walk for a mile. It was really uncomfortable, both physically and because I remembered those days in my twenties when I could run for hours comfortably.

But I told myself then, at least I'm out here doing this, doing something I love with a smile and no pressure to actually do it. Well. The first time I said no to pizza when everyone else was diving in and I had the first of hundreds of Turkey subs with no cheese and no oil. Instead, it was a little uncomfortable, but I felt good about making the right decision for me, and I knew my decisions were helping me become a better version of myself.

Those are just a couple of the thousands of uncomfortable moments I've had along the way, but each time I rise to the challenge. I feel like I take just a little bit more control of my life, and I realize I'm rewriting the story I've been telling myself for years, and that discomfort, it's become a signal that I'm heading in the right direction.

Let me be clear, though, not all discomfort is created equal. There's certainly harmful discomfort like over-training, ignoring injuries, or staying in toxic environments. Living with actual pain, those kind of things that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about productive discomfort. The kind that stretches your capacity, builds your emotional and physical muscles and shifts your identity from, I can't to, I did.

A key is that the things you stretch for need to be achievable and not so far out of your grasp that you don't stand a chance. Again, setting these kinds of goals means you need to be honest. With where you are in your journey and about what you can achieve, whether it be weight loss, working out, or even professional and personal growth, you need to look at the next rung on the ladder.

You can't really skip ahead, or you'll end up losing your grip and falling all the way back to the start. Think about it like strength training. You don't build muscle by lifting the same weight over and over. You build it by increasing resistance over time. You also can't just decide to lift two times more than you ever have you.

You won't be able to, and you might end up injuring yourself and that sets you, again, all the way back to zero or farther back. It's the same with mindset. We have to train ourselves to face that little resistance and say, this is uncomfortable, but I can handle it. And as we become more comfortable with the new level of resistance, we can increase it just a bit more.

So let's talk about how discomfort shows up in real life. Let's look at some common examples where in weight loss or any other transformation journey, you may see discomfort. When you start out, you may be really uncomfortable tracking food. For a lot of us, logging meals brings awareness. We've been avoiding some real challenges, seeing the real calorie count of your usual lunch order.

Uncomfortable, I. Yeah, realizing how often you graze during the day without realizing it uncomfortable. But again, awareness is the first step to change, and tracking is a tool that helps build it. Let's talk about discomfort when you work out or go to the gym or do anything like that. I know nobody likes being a beginner.

If you're going in the gym, you're maybe carrying around more weight than you want to, and you look around and everyone else seems to know what they're doing and they seem so fit, and you're just trying to figure out where the dumbbells are. Look, I've been there. We've all been there. It feels awkward. It feels vulnerable, but that's where growth happens.

Every strong person you see in that gym, they were once a beginner too. You just didn't see that part. I know a lot of folks who are embarrassed to run outside because they're afraid someone will judge them or they'll be embarrassed by how they look. First off, people just aren't as interested in what you're doing as you might think.

And for anyone who is looking out from their house or their car window as they drive by, you've already got those people beat. And as for other runners judging, I found most runners are really supportive of each other no matter how fast you're going. My point is. Just get out there. Let's talk a little bit about discomfort in social settings.

This one is huge. You go out with friends, everyone's ordering drinks and nap and dessert, and you're the one who asks for grilled chicken and water. I've done that a lot in that moment. It feels like you're the odd one out, but small act that's building a new identity, that's integrity in action. And honestly, the more you do it.

The more it became your new normal. I found that once people became aware of what I was doing, and once they began to see the changes in both my physical  and  mental state, they just stopped asking if I wanted whatever it was they were having. If someone wants to try to peer pressure you and to behaviors that don't mesh with your goals, you might need to have an honest conversation with that person or evaluate how healthy that relationship is for you in the first place.

Let's talk about some mindset shifts that can help you embrace discomfort. Let's talk about strategy because it's not magic. It's something you can practice. Here are three mindset shifts that help me get comfortable being uncomfortable. Number one, reframe the feeling instead of thinking, this is hard, I hate it.

Try this is hard, so it must be worth doing. Hard is not bad. Hard is where the good stuff is. That mental reframe shifts you from resistance to readiness. Number two, celebrate the effort, not just the outcome. When we only celebrate pounds lost or goals achieved, we miss all the little wins in between.

Start celebrating when you show up on hard days when you track your food, even though you don't want to. When you walk into the gym, despite the nerves and the feeling like you just don't fit in, when you finally commit to signing up for that race that you've always dreamed of doing, but could never imagine actually having the courage or fitness level to take on that challenge, that's courage and it deserves recognition.

Number three, expect discomfort and prepare for it. Discomfort should not be a surprise. It's part of the process. So treat it like a planned guest practice. Positive self-talk. For example, you could tell yourself, okay, I'm starting something new. That feeling of discomfort is gonna show up, but I've got a seat ready for it.

When you expect it, it doesn't knock you off course so easily. Let me tell you a little bit of story about renovation. And a hot plate. In August of 2019, we decided to renovate our kitchen. It was a full gut job and everyone in the family got involved in the demo. We tore out everything down to the wall studs.

There was no stove, no oven, no sink, no dishwasher, just chaos for three months now. It would've been super easy to decide in a moment like that that we were just gonna be eating out for the next few months. But I was committed to my weight loss plan, and we were committed to having dinner together as a family as often as we could.

Not to mention we were spending so much money on the kitchen. We really needed to save all we could by eating at home. So we set up a makeshift kitchen in our basement with a hot plate, a table, and a mini fridge. We even use an office storage cabinet to keep all our canned goods.  I work from home and we moved my office to the basement because the area where I was working was torn to pieces as well.

So needless to say, we crammed a lot into one room and we were all living on top of each other. My wife super organized and by the time we were ready to make our first meal in our new kitchen, it all went pretty smoothly. Yeah, it was tight cooking anything took a long time. And cleanup was about like what you do when camping.

But here's the thing. We all adapted from the meals we ate to how we helped clean up, and we got really good at cooking dinners and washing dishes in a bathroom sink. Was it awkward? Yep. Was it uncomfortable? For sure. Now we could have gotten frustrated and thrown in the towel and just eaten out so many times.

But here's the amazing thing. We all look back on it fondly. We laugh about the little hot plate and talk about how we made it work. Anyone who would come and visited us at that time would've thought we were nuts and, and maybe we were. Now, ironically, a few months after we completed the kitchen, the whole world closed down and we found ourselves at home trying to adapt to the new normal of the pandemic.

I know our time in that basement kitchen helped us understand. How to change, how to live together as a family, and it really helped us over the next year, plus when we were all inside together. Now look, I know our little kitchen in the basement isn't a major life challenge, but it did help us prepare for adaptation and change as a family, and it serves as a reminder to me that comfort's optional and you can be comfortable ultimately in some pretty uncomfortable situations.

Let's talk a little bit about what  getting comfortable. Being uncomfortable really means. It means you stop waiting for the perfect conditions to make progress. It means you stop letting small obstacles become permanent roadblocks. It means you start building confidence and not just discipline.

It means you become the kind of person who does hard things. And does them on purpose. It's not about white knuckling through misery. It's about knowing that discomfort is temporary and the freedom it creates is forever. So I have a key moving forward weekly challenge for you. Pick one area of your life where you've been avoiding discomfort.

Is it exercise? Is it food? Is it a hard conversation you've been putting off? Choose one uncomfortable step and take it, then track it, journal it, commit it to paper, let it stretch you. And once you've done that, do it again. Every time you move through discomfort, instead of away from it, you enforce the truth.

You can handle hard things. Let me share some closing thoughts. 

Discomfort is a signal, not a stop sign. It shows up in the gym, in our food choices, in our conversations, and in our self-talk. But when we stop running from it and start inviting it in, everything can change. If I've learned anything on this journey, it's this, the version of you that you're becoming, the one that feels strong, capable, confident, that version is waiting on the other side of your comfort zone.

 📍 Thanks so much for tuning in today. If this episode resonated with you, do me a favor, send it out to someone who's working on their own transformation. And if you haven't already, check out, use two guide.com for more stories, strategies and tools to help you stay on the path. So keep showing up, keep stretching, keep growing, and above all else, keep moving forward.