In earlier life, while I was at University, I had the motivation (and the time) to turn my fatness into strength. I'm a big guy at 6'5" and I was always relatively strong, but I made the choice to improve that strength and become proper strong. Over the course of a few years I turned a fat 140kg into a massive and strong 145-150kg. I was in the gym 6 days a week, playing a ton of half court basketball and dabbling in a few other sports as well. My work was physical and it all worked well together. As I left Uni and slotted into work life and evolved into more of an office type role in my field, I stacked on the weight. I revolved my weight goals around various events, mostly cycling. I found weight goals just for the hell of it hard to maintain as life's little hurdles would get in the way and before I knew it I was back to 10+kg heavier. A process I've repeated over and over again.
I'm only 41yo, so time is on my side. The most relateable discussion to your question is one I had recently with a former work colleague who is on the verge of 50. His goal is not to be a weight, his goal was just "to be able", and now that is my goal. I don't want a 6 pack, I just want to be able. I want to be able to run with my daughter when she asks, and not feel like I'm going to die afterwards. I want to be able to go on holidays and if I see a nice and perhaps difficult trail to climb, I can do it, rather than just sit at the bottom wondering. So now I'm on a steady weight loss journey, nothing dramatic, and maintaining a decent level of fitness. For sh!+s and giggles a few weeks ago, I went in a Spartan race because a friend asked if I wanted to be a part of their team. Now my caveat is that I've been doing a solid 6 months in the gym and that gave me some good grounding to tackle a lot of the obstacles, but I did it because I could, and there were only a few obstacles that I wasn't able to do.
I'm also moving towards the goal of just being able to move my weight around, kind of like a big guy's basic calisthenics. It's taken me a long time, but now I can do 3 sets of 5 unassisted chin ups, body weight dips and heaps of pushups. All that while I'm still currently at ~130kg body weight. I'm still far too fat, but I like the strength I have developed, and I'm enjoying the journey