Midlife Health and the Quit Point: When Effort Stops Making Sense
I Didn’t Lose Hope Because the Scale Went Up
I lost hope because the story I had organised my year around fractured. That’s the part people don’t say out loud. When a number doesn’t land, it’s easy to tell yourself you’re just disappointed, or frustrated, or that you’ll get back on it next week. But what broke for me wasn’t motivation, and it wasn’t discipline.
I had invested identity-level effort into a clear arc. I had organised a year of my life around a promise to myself, and when my body quietly said, not on that date, something inside me stalled. Not dramatically. Not catastrophically.
Just enough to trigger the question that sits beneath every long, demanding project:
If I can’t trust the arc, why am I bothering with this?
That question doesn’t come from a place of woe-is-me. It comes from intelligence. If you’ve ever felt yourself go a little flat after months of steady effort, you’ll recognise it. You don’t quit. You don’t rebel. You just … loosen your grip. You stop believing in the story quite as much as you did. Not enough to burn it down. Just enough to stop arguing with yourself about why you should still care.
That’s where I am right now. And that’s where this story starts.
It also happens to be the time of year when people are expected to feel optimistic, decisive, and ready for a clean slate. When new beginnings are supposed to feel energising rather than heavy. And yet, if I’m honest, this year has left many of us tired, reflective, and oddly disconnected from the idea of starting over.
Why I Started This in the First Place
At the beginning of the year, I weighed 105kg – not my highest weight, at its peak I was 112kgs – but as I entered my 50th year that number mattered. Probably not for the reasons people usually assume.
This didn’t start as a self-improvement project. It started as an obstinate refusal and a point to prove.
A refusal to absorb the quiet, insidious messaging that says that by fifty, your body is basically done negotiating. That weight loss is “harder now”. That peri-menopause ruins everything. That traditional methods don’t work anymore. That if you’re not injecting something or popping something, you’re naive, behind the curve, or wasting your time.
It was, in all honesty, two fingers up.
Two fingers up to the idea that my agency had expired. Two fingers up to the suggestion that effort without pharmaceutical assistance was pointless. Two fingers up to the shrinking of possibility that so often gets framed as realism. The kind of realism that somehow always sounds suspiciously like resignation.
I’m stubborn. That helps.
I wanted to prove a point. But not publicly. To myself.
I wanted to know whether I could still do something slow, demanding, and unglamorous, without the accountability of an audience. Whether I could sustain a sensible calorie deficit. Train consistently. Eat in a protein-first but balanced way. Adapt when life disrupted things. Stay in the game without turning it into punishment, martyrdom, or pious restriction.
Not because I needed to be thin, or because I was chasing reinvention, but because I needed to know I hadn’t quietly agreed to decline or opted out of my own capacity.
What I Didn’t Understand at the Start
What I didn’t understand at the beginning was that this wasn’t really about weight. It was about safety. Well, I did know that, but I had applied the knowledge in the wrong way and created a narrative that was not true.
I had a story that my body carried weight as a form of self-protection triggered by the trauma of being held up at gunpoint in 2012. That’s when the weight gain started. I put on 20kgs in just over a year, because my life stopped and fear took hold and I stopped doing all the things that kept me fit and healthy, and I ate my feelings – I had a lot of big feelings.
Now, some of this had some truth, but a decade on and the story was getting old and tired, yet the weight still held – so I had to dig deeper into my relationship with safety.
My body did carry weight as a form of self-protection. Not because I didn’t care about myself, but because being less visible, less noticeable, less commented on has often felt safer than the alternative. There’s a strange paradox that doesn’t get talked about much: for some people, being attractive, capable, or visibly strong doesn’t just bring desire or admiration. It brings expectation. It brings demand. It brings the unspoken sense that you should now do more for others.
Weight, for me, has been a way of managing that. A buffer. A way of not standing out too much. A way of staying contained.
My weight kept me safe. I didn’t start this year truly understanding why or how. I learned it along the way. And that learning only became possible because something else had already shifted.
The Role of Safety and the People Who Made It Possible
Bodies don’t change because they’re bullied into it. They change when they believe it’s safe to do so. That’s the bit most health narratives skip over. What made this year different wasn’t just macros or training plans. It was the fact that, for the first time in a long while, my nervous system felt settled.
Now, I haven’t spent the year lying on a beach sipping mojitos and oo-ming my way to inner peace. I opened two new businesses this year and overhauled my existing business whilst working with clients on their life and business landscapes – so my nervous system did not settle through endless serenity and calm!
By gaining a better understanding of my relationship with safety, something shifted. My sense of safety began to come through my relationships, and through a different relationship with uncertainty. That integration, between the internal and the external, changed everything.
My relationships. Not all of them. Not idealised ones. Not perfect ones. The reliable ones. People who show up. People whose behaviour is predictable. People I know I can rely on now, even if not forever.
For the first time I felt like I had “my persons”, a phrase often restricted to romantic relationships and believe me there is no romance happening here. As part of my growth this year I started to explore the idea of emotional intimacy and true rawness within my core friendships.
That matters more than we like to admit.
Because when you know you’re not alone, when you know there are people who have your back, your body doesn’t have to armour itself in the same way. It doesn’t need to hide. It doesn’t need to hold on quite so tightly.
That safety didn’t make the work easier.
It made it possible.
Self-Respect, Mirroring, and an Uncomfortable Truth
Somewhere along the way, another truth landed. One I didn’t love at first but couldn’t unsee.
You can’t ask the world for standards you’re unwilling to meet yourself.
At first this felt like comparison, judgement or needing to become someone else to be chosen, but that was all surface level thinking. Turns out, it was about congruence.
If I say I want a certain kind of relationship, a certain level of vitality, curiosity, physical presence, and engagement with life, then I must be willing to embody that too. Not perfectly. Not performatively. But honestly.
I mean, once I had seen it this was so obvious, my whole business mantra is about living what I lead.
It’s very easy to tell yourself stories about why other people aren’t what you want them to be. Much harder to ask whether you are living in alignment with what you say matters.
That insight wasn’t the reason I started losing weight, but it became part of the meaning that sustained it.
The Promise I Made to Myself
By mid-year, this project had become something more than habit. I wasn’t just losing weight, I was building evidence. Trust. Self-respect.
I stayed consistent, adapted when things wobbled, learned how my body responded to stress, hormones, illness, and fatigue. I built muscle. I increased my metabolic capacity. I proved to myself that I could stay with something without obsessing and destroying myself in the process.
And somewhere in there, I made a promise. Not explicitly, but implicitly.
By the end of the year, this arc will complete.
That’s the danger point.
In midlife, we don’t set timelines casually. We don’t experiment in the same way we did at twenty-eight. When we commit now, it’s deliberate. We’re staking time, energy, and identity.
So, when you organise a year around a promise to yourself, missing it doesn’t just disappoint you.
It destabilises coherence and quietly erodes self-trust.
When Meaning Creates Attachment
Attachment is a tricky thing, and something I think about a lot – mainly mulling over whether it is truly possible to live without it!
One thing I do know is that attachment is a sign that something matters.
But it does complicate things.
Once the story becomes meaningful, once it aligns internally, once it makes sense, you start wanting certainty. You start wanting the ending to land cleanly. You start needing the promise to resolve on schedule. That’s when dates stop being aspirational and start feeling moral.
That’s when missing a number by three kilos, or five, or whatever it ends up being, hits harder than logic says it should.
I didn’t lose twenty kilos this year. I lost seventeen.
On paper, that’s a success. Emotionally, it triggered a quiet reckoning.
The Quit Point: When Effort Stops Making Sense
I was first introduced to this thinking in one of Simon Hartley’s books. There’s a moment in any long, demanding project where continuing requires something different than it did at the start.
The quit point is described as:
Not the point where you’re incapable.
Not the point where you’re exhausted.
But the point where the original reason that carried you this far runs out.
The quit point doesn’t ask, Can you do this? It asks, Is this still worth it?
Most people misunderstand this moment. They think it’s where character fails. It isn’t. You only reach a quit point if you’ve already demonstrated capacity. If you’ve already stayed longer than most. If you’ve already proved you can do hard things.
The danger at the quit point isn’t that you stop. It’s that you collapse meaning.
I missed my 2025 target by 3kgs, and with that some hope leaked away.
The easiest thing for me to do right now would be to give up. Not dramatically or in a blaze of rebellious Quality Street consumption.
Just to quietly disengage. Stop tracking so closely. Loosen the routines. Tell myself I’ll “come back to it” later. That would relieve the disappointment. It would take the pressure off. It would stop the hurt from caring quite so much, which, temporarily at least, can feel like a perfectly reasonable life strategy.
But, it would also undo something important.
Because opting out at the quit point isn’t neutrality. It’s avoidance.
Vulnerability, Courage, and Reassessment
This is where vulnerability lives. Not in oversharing your life story on social media, but in staying present when certainty dissolves. Courage doesn’t exist without vulnerability. And vulnerability isn’t exposure for effect.
It’s the willingness to remain engaged when the story you were relying on stops working.
For me, courage here doesn’t look like pushing harder. It looks like reassessment. This is what I do. I pause. I feel it. I reassess. I ask different questions.
What does this mean now?
What am I really attached to?
What matters going forward, and what can loosen?
What would it look like to continue without forcing the original frame?
Reassessment isn’t quitting. It’s refusing to lie to yourself. It’s radical self honesty.
So, what do I know right now? I know that the work I’ve done this year is banked. It doesn’t reset because a date slipped. I know that the next phase isn’t the same project as the first. It doesn’t require the same intensity, or the same proof. And I know that the feeling I’m sitting in right now isn’t failure. It’s the signal that meaning needs to be consciously reconnected, not assumed.
This matters, particularly at this point. January has a habit of demanding change when what’s actually required is discernment. We’re encouraged to wipe the slate clean when, in reality, most of us are standing inside something unfinished rather than something broken.
An Invitation (Not a Conclusion)
There’s a particular pressure at the turn of the year to declare what’s next, to commit to bold intentions, or to announce a fresh version of yourself. But not all transitions require a dramatic pivot. Some ask for something quieter: an honest stock-take, a recalibration of expectations, and a willingness to continue without discarding what’s already been created.
If you’re reading this and something in you feels familiar, I don’t think it’s because you’ve lost your mojo. Maybe you are facing a quiet quit point?
And the question isn’t whether you should push, or quit, or start again. The question is whether you’re willing to reassess without abandoning yourself. Not everything that feels heavy is wrong. Not every wobble is regression.
Sometimes it’s just time to re-author the meaning.
That’s where I am. Still here. Still moving. Slightly altered. And paying attention.
I’m not starting again. I’m starting from here.
That feels like the most honest place to continue from.
Like what you're reading?
If this spoke to the part of you that hasn’t quit, but has quietly lost conviction, you’re not alone. The moment when effort stops making sense isn’t a failure of discipline. It’s a signal that something deeper needs to be named, and re-aligned.
By email, I share the conversations that don’t fit neatly into posts like this. The ones about midlife quit points, self-trust, attachment to outcomes, and how to reassess without abandoning yourself. It’s where we talk honestly about staying in the game when the original story runs out, and how meaning, not motivation, is what carries you forward.
Thoughtful reflections. Grounded psychology. The occasional dry observation about being a competent adult who thought this phase would feel clearer by now.
👉 Join here and take a step closer to a better second half.
The Fundamental 5 Framework helps high-achieving midlifers make sense of moments like this, not by pushing harder, but by restoring coherence across self, health, work, relationships, and lifestyle. It’s designed for people who don’t need another overhaul, but a way to reassess what’s already in motion without erasing it.
If something in your life feels unfinished rather than broken, start with the 10-minute Audit and see which area is asking for attention now, not because you’ve failed, but because you’re ready for the next, more honest phase.
A Quick Note:
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog - I know your time is precious and I am grateful you chose to invest some of it here with me.
