When Life Changes Your Routine — Adjust, Don't Abandon

It's the last week of October and life has changed shape. It's half term, so whether you're juggling younger children, teenagers or grandchildren, the usual rhythm of the week is suddenly different. Storms have rolled in — the wettest, windiest training weather of the year so far. The clocks have gone back, so it's dark by late afternoon. And if you look at a calendar, Christmas is now just over eight weeks away.

This exact week is where goals quietly get shelved. Not abandoned dramatically — just paused, with a promise to "start again in January". I want to talk you out of that, because this is precisely the time not to abandon your goals. It's the time to stay focused, and the way to do that is to adjust — not to stop.

Don't abandon your goals now

Here's the thing that gets missed: continuing to move, strength train and choose better nutrition is what keeps you resilient to stress and overwhelm. When life is at its busiest, your habits aren't a luxury to drop — they're what holds you up. The walk, the session, the protein at breakfast: those are the things that keep your energy, mood and patience intact while everything else is pulling at you.

So this fortnight isn't about pushing harder. It's about holding on rather than letting go. The women who roll into December feeling in control aren't the ones who had a perfect autumn — they're the ones who didn't let a disrupted week turn into a lost season.

Treat it as a maintenance phase

You don't need to chase new personal bests through half term and storms. Give yourself permission to maintain: keep the habit alive at a smaller size, hold the strength you've built, keep your meals protein-first. Maintenance is not failure and it's certainly not doing nothing — it's how you arrive in December still in the game, instead of starting over.

It matters in midlife, too, because muscle and strength take far longer to build than they do to lose (I've written about that in Why Protecting Your Muscle Matters). A fortnight of smaller sessions protects months of work. A fortnight of nothing asks your body to give some of it back.

Adjust, don't abandon — three ways

• Shrink it, don't stop it. On a packed half-term day, two or three exercises and twenty minutes still count. A "minimum session" keeps the habit breathing until your normal week returns.
• Move it, don't lose it. Shift sessions around family being home, days out and travel — a Tuesday session can become a Saturday one. If the storm keeps you from the gym, the home session from Week 3 needs a band, a couple of dumbbells and the living room floor.
• Eat for the week you actually have. School holidays and wet weekends aren't the moment for complicated cooking. Keep it simple: protein at every meal, warm filling food from Autumn Fuel, and balance over the day rather than perfection at every plate. That's what food freedom really means — you understand what fuels you, so your choices flex with life instead of collapsing without it.

Why this is your resilience

When you're stressed and overwhelmed, exercise and decent nutrition are often the first things to go — yet they're the things that steady everything else. Movement lowers the background hum of stress, strength training reminds you that you're capable, and eating properly keeps your energy from crashing by 3 pm. I've written more about managing stress in Stress in Midlife — but the short version is that your habits are the scaffolding, especially when the week is messy.

And if motivation has gone quiet, that's normal at this point in the year. As I say in Motivation Gets You Started, it's habit that carries you — and habits survive by being flexible, not perfect.

Eight weeks to Christmas

Yes — just over eight weeks. But that's not a deadline for a dramatic transformation, and I won't pretend it is. It's eight busy weeks, filling up with work dos, family plans and Christmas preparations, and the women who feel good in December are the ones who kept moving and eating well through them, at whatever size their weeks allowed.

Here's what I'm doing personally. I'm in for the next six weeks — staying focused, training consistently and keeping my nutrition sensible. Then I'll allow myself some genuine flexibility for a couple of weeks over the festive and New Year period, without guilt and without calling it a failure. That's the plan working, not falling apart.

Six weeks is a realistic ask. It's long enough to build strength, energy and momentum, and it means the festive fortnight becomes a break you've earned rather than a collapse you're recovering from. When the New Year arrives, you're not starting again from zero — you're simply picking the habit back up.