Slowly But Surely I’m Losing Weight

Five months of pickle ball three days a week and at least a month of wally ball one day a week for two hours each time is causing me to shape-shift in a positive direction. I’m just ounces away from weighing as little as I’ve weighed in twenty years, and I’m extremely excited about that.

I’d like to lose another 30 pounds (heck, I’d like to lose fifty pounds, but let’s not talk fantasy, here, at 68 years old!) but I didn’t start playing these sports to lose weight. I started them to get my core muscles back in shape after years of being mostly sedentary, so I’m not going to start feeling bad if I don’t lose a lot. My metabolism is completely shot–has been for decades–so focusing on losing weight (instead of having fun) would just frustrate me, so I’m not going to do that.

Because I’m exercising more, I find myself wanting to  keep moving when I get home, so when I’m not writing for clients, I’m doing stuff around the house and outside.

Last week I cleaned the shed and mucked the goat shed, both of which were heavy-duty tasks and took lots of muscles. The good news is that I didn’t wear out while doing these chores nearly as fast as I did before I started playing sports on a regular basis.

It’s never too late to start exercising. The trick is to find exercises that are so much fun that they become addictive. Pickle ball and  wally ball are those sports to me.

I like bike riding too, but not as much. And bicycling is limited to days when it isn’t too cold, too wet, or too hot, where pickling and  wally ball can be done indoors all year long, so the weather can’t postpone them unless we get snowed in. (That happened just once, for a few days, this winter.)

I highly recommend getting into a sport that is so much fun that it becomes a treat instead of a chore. I’m not a glutton for punishment, but I am a big fan of having fun, and pickle ball and wally ball are as fun as sports can get. Most of the people I play with are wonderful, too, so that makes it even more special.

There are a few 80 and 90 year old people playing pickle ball where I play and they give me hope that I’ll stay as limber and as agile as they are as long as I keep playing. The rest of us are in our late forties to mid-sixties; occasionally we’ll get relatives of our usual players who are younger but, for the most part, it’s AARP-age participants where I play.

If you’ve never heard of pickle ball or wally ball, look them up on YouTube.

Wally ball can get really wild and it’s very noisy in the building–the decibel level on the  court is painful–so I wear ear plugs when playing wally ball.  It’s kind of like volleyball but you can slam the ball into the walls, so it’s kind of like trying to catch and redirect a ball in a pinball machine–it can come at you from a lot of different directions! It takes real skill. I’m not very good at it yet.

I’m pretty good playing pickle ball. I wear a t-shirt that reads WORLD’S OKAYEST PICKEBALL PLAYER, which is all I aspire to. I’m there for fun and exercise, not to become a threat to the pros who play it.

Anyway, it keeps me out of trouble and I highly recommend it for just about everybody who’s able-bodied. It’ll help keep you in good shape, for sure… Here’s what my pickle ball racket looks like…