For those of you currently playing the NFL Playoff Challenge, I may be in 242,381-st place, but I’m moving up the charts with a bullet! My Superbowl line-up is Peyton Manning, Joseph Addai, Reggie Wayne, and Adam Vinatieri (all of which I’ve had since the Divisional Round so I’m earning each point times three this week) and Reggie Bush, Marques Colston, Dallas Clark, and the Saints defense (all of which I’ve had since the Championship Round so I’m earning each point times two this week. Lookout leaderboard, here I come!
For you total fantasy football junkies, there are still on-line games out there (like this one) if you need one last fantasy football game before the 2010 NFL season starts.
Enjoy the Superbowl! Try out some healthy recipes for the game. Here is one for a super soup. The soup isn’t the right colors for the Colts or Saints, but who really wants to eat blue and white (or black and gold) soup anyway!
We launched our website/blog only two years ago during the Superbowl halftime. Thanks for being with us through 100+ posts and for all your great emails and comments. Remember that Fantasy Healthball doesn’t end with the regular season or even the NFL playoffs. You can play all through the off-season (we call it Training Camp) and you can stay tuned to this blog for inspiration, information, humor, fantasy tips, health tips, and more. — Jim Ballard
Healthy foods often get an unfair bad rap. They are tasteless, like cardboard, bland, boring, yuck. Think: plate of overcooked, squishy, lifeless vegetables staring back at you when the ad comes on TV for the new bacon double cheese special sauce burger. Hmmm, which to choose?
At Fantasy Healthball, we are not about deprivation of taste. And as we say on our nutrition page, starving yourself is like treating your body like the enemy and makes about as much sense as not exercising for a year and then running a marathon to make up for it. So, you gotta eat. And you gotta eat healthy. So you might as well also make it tasty!
In this short article, nutritionist Joy Bauer talks about foods that are good for you, will fill you up, and taste great! One of her suggestions is a shrimp cocktail. Shrimp taste great and are a great source of protein. They are also high in B12, iron, selenium, and niacin. All great vitamins you can read more about here. And they are just plain fun to eat! But which shrimp to buy? When it comes to seafood, we love the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch. As best choices, they recommend US farmed freshwater prawns, wild caught pink shrimp from Oregon, pacific and west coast white shrimp, and spot prawns from British Columbia. They say stay away from imported tiger prawns, black tiger shrimp, ebi, and white shrimp. At their website, you can download their handy Seafood Watch card and bring it with you to the fish store or grocery store.
Other than the shrimp cocktail, Bauer recommends a fiery chicken salad, homemade pumpkin pudding, vegetable soup, cucumber tomato onion salad, and ginger green tea. Specifically for the veggie soup, she recommends a Creole version that is “super spicy.” Speaking of spicing things up, we love it!
One of our favorites is plain old Tabasco sauce, which is a pure pepper sauce. It can be found in every grocery store and corner market on Earth. Take the photo above for example. Some nice pasta, a little tomato, parsley, it will taste good all by itself. But add a little Tabasco to kick it up a notch or three!
And my personal flavor secret, that I put on practically everything, is Sriracha hot sauce (made in the USA). It is particularly wonderful on Chinese food, but great in soup, on pasta, veggie burgers, chicken, cooked veggies, fish, rice, well, practically everything. Try it out, and let us know what you think. You can find it in Asian supermarkets, Albertsons, Ralphs, Vons, others, or order it online. Your food will never be bland again! Healthy? Yes. Tasty? Yes! — Jim Ballard
Back in December 2009, we wrote a post about your health being a team sport. It was about building up your supporters – your teammates – to help you achieve your health goals. Now, University of Georgia researchers have given us some scientific proof!
Their study suggest that self-control is contagious. Now, my family has dealt with a lot of contagious bugs this winter, and we have the empty boxes of Tylenol Cold and Flu to prove it, but this is one contagion you should seek out! “In a series of studies in a lab setting, researchers found that watching or even thinking about someone with good self-control makes others more likely to show the same restraint. And they found the opposite also holds true — people with lousy self-control influence others negatively. The effect is so powerful, in fact, that just seeing the name of someone with good or bad self-control flashing on a screen for 10 milliseconds changed the behavior of volunteers.”
So just thinking of someone who exercises good self-control can help you achieve self-control as well. Who comes to mind for you? Who do you know that exhibits good self-control?
Try to think of someone. Is it a friend or spouse or family member or professional athlete or coach or teacher or maybe even the President of the United States? Think of that model of self-control to you when you need some self-control yourself.
Take a photo of that person to the grocery store or to the restaurant or gym – anyplace you want to remind yourself of your health goals. Tape it to the inside of your refrigerator! The Bulldog researcher said “the magnitude of the influence might be significant enough to be the difference between eating an extra cookie at a party or not, or deciding to go to the gym despite a long day at work. The effect isn’t so strong that it absolves people of accountability for their actions, she explained, but it is a nudge toward or away from temptation.”
In other words, it is a good block that you can use to hit the hole and get the first down yourself. It is great if you can catch self-control from those around you and help each other to reach health goals, but this study suggests you don’t even have to know the person – but as long as they personify “self-control” to you, they can help you. If you DO have teammates who can “block for you,” you can exercise together, cook healthy foods together, and, of course, play Fantasy Healthball together! — Jim Ballard
So much for loading up on Patriots in the NFL Playoff Challenge 2009! The Patriots lose 33-14. Well, at least the rest of my team were Cowboys! Cowboys crush the McEagles by just about the same score. So with my fantasy week completed, and my chances of winning the NFL Playoff Challenge and going to the Superbowl probably equally done, it is time to turn to those Resolutions!
‘Member those? It wasn’t that long ago that we made those annual pledges. Well, if you didn’t make any, there is still time to get those in! We’ve seen all sorts of recommendations lately, and even made some ourselves, but we really like this particular list from health.com (click here) for the sheer impressive volume! 50 of them! That is even more challenges than we have in our daily roster scorecard! But, ahem, we weren’t about to put knitting (tip #21) in our daily roster scorecard!
Actually, what we really like about this list is all the random little things that maybe you don’t think about as healthy. All the little tips and ideas that seem small and mundane taken alone, but add up to something really impressive. What can they add up to? You thinking about health, exercise, nutrition, etc. in your every day life throughout the day. For example, thought about the size of you plates before (tip #9)?! They were a wedding gift, right? They is what they is! Well, think again! Check out the 50 and tell us what you think by email or just comment below.
Now, let’s be realistic, cutting 500 calories a day is a nice title for an article, but how many of us, given our very busy schedules, have time to dance for two hours a day (tip #1) or clean the house for two and a half hours (tip #22)? I think the last time I cleaned the house for two and a half hours it was my college apartment and I was trying to get my security deposit back (hint: large can of spackle). And I think all that foot tapping (tip #34) would cause my office colleagues to have me committed.
But really there is some great stuff here. At Fantasy Healthball, rather than trying to cut 500 calories a day swimming laps (tip #37), we typically recommend going at it on two fronts – get some of it through exercise and some of it through diet. Read more here. Meanwhile, get out there and hit tip #40, you couldn’t do any worse than the guys I picked on my fantasy playoff team! — Jim Ballard
Welcome to 2010, your healthiest year yet! Why? Because you have 365 brand new days to make healthier choices whether you want to lose 2 pounds or 100, whether you are looking to fit into those skinny jeans or just feel better and stronger, 2010 is for you. So, being 1/1/10, it is resolution time, baby! And if you are having trouble thinking of some, let us give you five to get you started:
1) Change your eating habits. Sure it’s portion size, but it is also what is in those portions. The vitamins and mineral and nutrients. As of TODAY, the state of California became the first in the country to ban artificial trans fats (often found in fried foods, cookies, crackers, etc). Restaurants can no longer use oil, shortening, or margarine that contains trans fats. You need to ban them as well and take these other healthy eating moves.
2) Change your drinking habits. Enjoy more water and less sodas, energy drinks, caffeine, and alcohol. Jeff and I LOVE this video that came out of NYC recently. Check it out:
3) Get off the couch. Okay, stay on the couch for the bowl games and the NFL playoffs, but when those games aren’t on, work up a little sweat. Also use halftime to zip Fido around the block a few times. We’ve got hordes of ideas for you. Start slowly if this is new for you. Plenty of time to work up to conquering the universe.
4) Get inspired. Figure out what inspires you and use it to take better care of your body in 2010. Here are some ideas.
5) Join us in Fantasy Healthball. If you love sports and have some health goals, you will LOVE Fantasy Healthball. You’ll find more than 20 resolutions, uh, health challenges on our weekly scorecard. You can play through the playoffs, you can play in the off-season, you can play anytime. Still free in 50 of 50 States! Find out how.
Other ideas that you have? Send us a comment to this post! — Jim Ballard
The results are in and the “HanStars” team has won the championship of our fantasy football custom league this year over my very own Healthball Hulks who took the consolation prize finishing #2. The final score was 105 to 89 as my Hulks picked a bad week to lay off the gas pedal.
Congrats to the HanStars led by their QB Tony Romo (15 points) and RBs Adrien Peterson (23 points) and Thomas Jones (16 points). My QB Aaron Rodgers went from an amazing 43 points the week before to finish with only 15 in the championship. I’ll take some pride in finishing second with both teams in the championship in the west coast division. The mighty midwest division had two teams in the semi-finals, the “Munching Monsters” and “Commissioner Hagen’s team” but the west coasters were too much for them this year.
On the Fantasy Healthball side, the Healthball Hulks had the top record in the league at 13-3. Those three losses came in a bundle in weeks 6, 7, and 8 to my NFL opponents’ scores of 143, 131, and 104. Just goes to show, there are no guaranteed wins in Fantasy Healthball and you need to get to triple digits week in and week out to ensure a quality season. You can win with less than that, but quality health on a consistent basis will change your life.
The final result of our fantasy football season are some pretty nice bragging rights over my colleague and best friend Jeff Hagen. But the results of going 13-3 in Fantasy Healthball will be with me for even longer. Bragging rights come and go, but great healthy choices sustained over a period of time stick with you for the long run.
Thanks to everyone who played in our custom league, in your own leagues, and in Fantasy Healthball. So are we done? Maybe for the calendar year 2009 but not for the 2009 NFL season! See you all at the NFL’s Fantasy Playoff Challenge 2009! We’ll be playing Fantasy Healthball in the playoffs and in the off-season too (training camp), learn how! — Jim Ballard
Ah, the smells of football. Blood ground into a jersey. Mud caked onto cleats. The sweat at the bottom of the pile. For most of us, though, we don’t really smell these particular odors. So let me start again for the average fantasy fan…….
Ah, the smells of football. Buffalo chicken wings. Creamy coleslaw. French fries. Nachos. Bacon cheeseburger. Oh, yeah, we know these smells quite well! However, the better you know these smells, the better you might know what LDL stands for. And, I can tell you, it does not stand for Left Defensive Lineman.
LDL is the “bad cholesterol” or “low density lipoprotein” for you science types out there. I think of cholesterol as kind of like a car-wax type of substance. Except that it is found in your bloodstream and in all your body’s cells. Just the right amount of cholesterol is a good thing – your body uses it for a number of important functions – but too much and you and your family may be dealing with your coronary heart disease, heart attack, or stroke.
High cholesterol puts you at risk for atherosclerosis which is a fancy name for crud in your arteries. It is like a thick plaque that builds up on your teeth, except a dentist just can’t scrape it away because the plaque is in your artery walls. When blood can’t flow freely, all sorts of bad things happen. Our heart and our brain like a regular supply of blood, so when the freeways are jammed, the resulting traffic jam can be deadly.
Like I said, LDL is the bad guys. HDL, or high density lipoprotein, is the good guys. HDL seems to slow down or repair some of the damage that the LDL does. You want to be lower in LDL and higher in HDL. When you get a blood test to check your cholesterol, and you totally should, they count your LDL, HDL and triglycerides and Lp(a) which is LDL’s no good cousin.
Your body creates the cholesterol you need but you also get it through foods. The American Heart Association has a really cool food guide that will give you advice on what to eat and what not to eat for all sorts of different foods: Mexican, American, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, fast food, steakhouses, etc.
The daily recommended cholesterol limit is less than 300 milligrams for people with normal LDL levels. The nutrition facts label of food, learn more about those here, is a good place to look. Even if it lists cholesterol content as low or none, see if it has saturated fats and/or trans fats. Does it have hydrogenated fats and oils on the list of ingredients? All these things lead to higher cholesterol.
So what do you do about it? You play Fantasy Healthball with us and change your lifestyle! Don’t smoke, eat less fatty foods, keep your weight down, exercise, talk to your doctor in-depth about if medications are necessary. Replace some of those football smells I mentioned earlier with some new ones – veggie burger, grilled fish or chicken breast, taco salad (skip the shell), steamed or stir fried veggies, low sodium soups and more. Ah, the smells of football! Smells good! — Jim Ballard
Peyton Manning walks up to the line of scrimmage. He deftly surveys the defense and their formation. The crowd noise blisters his eardrums. The linebackers are showing blitz. One of them is glaring at him homicidally. Manning quickly glances at the play clock. He starts his cadence. “Green 48…Green 48! Hut, hut!,” but where is the ball? He doesn’t feel it snap comfortably into his large hands. In fact, he doesn’t even see the center. He’s got no line, no receivers, no backs. He is out there all by himself.
On the third hut he grabs the ball and runs the only play he can – a one man quarterback sneak. With only one man, it is not very sneaky, and 11 men jump angrily on his back driving him to the turf. Football, as you see, is a team effort.
Your health, as we say at Fantasy Healthball, is also a team effort. Re-learning how to eat and following our nutrition and exercise guidelines won’t be simple. If it were simple, everyone would be slim, trim, and live to see their grandchildren’s children. The word “liposuction” would never have been invented. The world would have been spared ever seeing Richard Simmons in spandex yelling, “Come on girls, shake those buns with me, you can do it!” But improving your health, losing weight, re-learning how to eat, and exercising takes work. And as they say, “many hands make light work.”
Re-learning how to eat is much easier if you can get support from other members of your household: spouse, family members, roommates, etc. If you are dedicated to eating right, and your roommate is constantly stocking the kitchen shelves with bon bons or high-calorie, high-fat super sugar fun cakes or whatever, that isn’t helping anybody. You can change your eating habits on your own, but it is a lot easier with support. You can run through and over would-be tacklers, but it is a lot easier if you have some blocking!
We recommend talking about your health goals to the people you live with and/or the people you work most closely with or spend the most time with. Will power is much easier if unhealthy food isn’t around you to begin with. Speaking from my own experience, if the unhealthy food is right in front of me, it is hard to pass it up. But if it is not there, it is much easier for me to grab an apple or banana or raisins or any of the World’s Healthiest Foods.
Building up your team of supporters will also help you in other ways. As teammates, they will help you achieve your goals, whether that is giving you time to walk around the block for 30 minutes a day or keeping their high-cal, high-fat, super sugar fun cakes in a special place away from where your food is, or work colleagues bringing you fruit instead of Costco cookies. They can give you moral support to and cheer you on. Hey, they might even join you. Be a workout partner. Make healthy meals together. Try new recipes! Or, if they play fantasy sports, make it a friendly competition by playing Fantasy Healthball!
So remember, you can do this alone. Email us for some more tips on how to do it alone. But the going is much easier with a team around you. People who care and want you to achieve your goals. Don’t run three quarterback sneaks and then punt on 4th down. Use your team for a balanced and high scoring offense. – Jim Ballard
There is always plenty to stress about (money, job, relationships) and us fantasy football fans have even more to stress about: Why did Aaron Rodgers only get 7 fantasy points for me this past week even though it was the first round of our league playoffs? Will the Bears “Gnat” Forte ever score again? Will my Healthball Hulks have enough to beat Commissioner Hagen’s team in next weeks Semifinal Playoff game? Am I actually HEALTHIER by stressing about these things?
A doc at UCLA has been studying post-stress illness also known as the “let down effect.” Dr. Marc Schoen, the UCLA doc, and I have something in common. We both seem to get sick right after a big push at work or a stressful period ends. Way too many times have I crammed at work to prepare for my vacation only to get sick on the vacation. My body seems to let down when I allow my engine to idle after a period of fast racing.
In this WebMD article, Schoen suggests that stress hormones mobilize the immune system against illness but when the stressful period ends the body stands down and infection strikes. He says the effect has been associated with conditions such as upper respiratory infections, the flu, migraine headaches, dermatitis, arthritis pain, and depression.
Schoen acknowledges that other factors could be at play such as having been exposed to something in the heat of our stress, or, he says, “it might be something that develops afterward through this open window, where any organisms around us have a far greater chance of infecting us.”
We’ve already covered staying healthy and exercising while sick, but what can be done to avoid this let down effect? Schoen recommends activating the immune system at little (a brisk walk, a quick exercise)to keep it from slowing down to rapidly after a period of stress, engaging the mind through crossword puzzles or other mental problem solving, and relaxation techniques such as deep breathing or meditation. All these things are right up our alley here at Fantasy Healthball. We’d add multi-vitamins to the list and eating the healthy foods that boost your immunity.
Paying close attention to these things right after a stressful period may help you avoid the let down effect. Send us a comment and let us know how these things work for you. — Jim Ballard
Please allow us just a short soap box on smoking. When I was in elementary school, I was convinced that my generation would be the first one to just never start smoking. We had too much overwhelming evidence from all directions that smoking was bad for us. Boy, was I ever wrong. In 2008, the CDC reported that in the US almost 24% of those 25 to 44 year old are current smokers. How can that be?
We get the smoking thing. We get the cool thing. We get where the cool thing came from. We have seen the classic films with Betty Grable or Humphrey Bogart. We’ve seen how cigarettes in movies are often flaunted like a magic wand of coolness.
We get the smoking thing as it relates to music. The rock star with the cigarette hanging off the head of his guitar adding more smokiness to the already hazy atmosphere. Jerry Garcia, Roy Orbison, George Harrison.
Would Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Nat “King” Cole, Sammy Davis Jr. or Duke Ellington have been as cool if they weren’t smokers?
We get the smoking thing as it relates to the tough side of cool. The Marlboro Man (David McLean) is the embodiment of cool with his cowboy hat and charging horse.
The other part that we get, and we want our readers to get too, is that everyone named in this post died of causes linked to smoking such as lung cancer, throat cancer, pancreatic cancer, and heart attack.
But Fantasy Healthball isn’t about putting someone else’s choices on you. We aren’t going to tell you that you must stop smoking immediately. This book is all about you making your own choices. It is about you getting incrementally healthier until you are the healthy person you want to be. And it is about a long-term program that fits within your lifestyle.
We’ll leave it at this: pretend you had a lot riding on a NFL game and your team gathered for a pre-game smoke and your quarterback and running back lit up in the huddle, would you feel better or worse about your chances? Now pretend you have a lot riding on your own life… — Jim Ballard
Posted by Jim Ballard 
is a shrimp cocktail. Shrimp taste great and are a great source of protein. They are also high in B12, iron, selenium, and niacin. All great vitamins you can 
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