Going Shoppin’ for Health

Good health starts in the grocery store.  When you get back at your house, “If it ain’t there, you can’t eat it.”  Buy healthy, nutritious foods at the store and you will have healthy, nutritious foods to eat at home.  Funny how that works. 

Make sure you are in the right frame of mind when you go to the grocery store and don’t go until you can get into that frame.  Don’t go when you are hungry, mad, feeling sorry for yourself, or unhappy.  These emotions are likely to direct you to high-cal, high-fat comfort foods.  Go when you are feeling strong and dedicated to good health.  Make a list before you go if that helps you buy what you need rather than what catches your eye. 

The grocery store is a great place to read labels.  Want to know which bag of chips is better for you?  Check the label.  Look at the calories, fat, sodium, etc.  This is the place to do side by side comparisons to find out what you want to put in your body and what you want to leave on the shelf.  The more you read the labels, the smarter you will become about the healthiness of the foods.

And just think of the women (or men) you can pick up with smooth lines like: “Excuse me, have you seen a low-cal version of these cheesy puffs?”  Gets them every time.

Nutrients Made Easy

<Update:  There is still plenty of time to get into the Fantasy Healthball action for 2009.  If you like what you read here, check out our website.  You can take on the NFL pros and use your passion for football to get passion for great health.  Tell your friends and Read more here…>

Nutrients aren’t that complicated to understand.  There are only six classes of them:  carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, minerals, and water.  To make it even simpler: water, minerals, and vitamins don’t provide calories.  So, at Fantasy Healthball, we pay special attention to carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. 

Fat has more than twice as many calories as protein or carbohydrates, which is why fats should be eaten only sparingly.  You get the calories without the healthy nutrients.  This is really why it is so important to pay attention to what you are putting in your body.  You are going to get calories from most foods and drinks, so you want to keep an eye on whether you are eating low or high calorie foods and how much healthy nutrients are in your food. 

The way to do this is to become a student of nutrition labels.  You should study them like a rookie studies the playbook.  The ingredients most often appear below the “Nutrition Facts” and are listed in the order of quantity.  There is more of the first ingredient than the second, and so on.  If you are trying to cut back on sugar, for example, you want to make sure it is not included in the list or at least listed towards the end.  

Click below on the sample “Nutrition Facts” for a generic bag of barbeque potato chips (from our favorite nutrition facts source).  Notice the high calorie content, the high fats and saturated fats, and the high sodium.  Granted, this is for the whole bag, but you can’t eat just one! 

Watch out for hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated fats and oils, known as trans fatty acids or “trans fats.”  You want to limit your intake of these.  Trans fats are found at high levels in foods such as French fries, donuts, and vegetable shortening.  You will also want to limit saturated fats such as butter, candy bars, and cake.  As of January 1, 2006, food manufacturers had to include on their nutrition labels the amount of trans fats.  The FDA has required that saturated fats and cholesterol be listed on food labels since 1993.  Saturated and trans fats raise cholesterol in the blood, which contributes to heart disease.  So, if you find yourself eating too much of this kind of food, we recommend choosing the “limit consumption of oils, trans fats, and saturated fats” and the ”eliminate high-fat processed foods and sweets” as part of your seven challenges for the week.  Remember, we are here to help.  Find out more great nutrition info and how you can take on the NFL pros and play Fantasy Healthball!  — Jim Ballard

Kevin’s Scorecard – 110 points

We have a guest blogger today, our friend Kevin:

Jeff and Jim asked me to post one of my weekly roster scorecards and tell you about my week.  You should be able to click on the image above to make it larger.  Well, here is how it went, starting from the top.  Exercise:  I can usually get to the gym on Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays because my wife picks up my son on those days.  I blew it on Monday, but I went for a hike on Saturday and I slipped in that special Sunday exercise.  So I got 4 exercises in for 8 points plus the ten point bonus (for getting at least 3, but not all 6) equals 18 on that one.  Fruit:  Oh yeah!  Every day of the week, baby.  That is 12 points plus the 10 point bonus (for getting all 6 days) is a clean 22.  Actually, between fruit on my cereal and at mid-morning snacks, this challenge may have been a little too easy for me (I eat a lot of fruit).  I’ll probably pick a different challenge next week.  Vegetables and also the Water challenge:  Both of these challenges went the same for me this week and I learned a good lesson.  I blew both of them on Monday and Tuesday.  Wednesday, I got smart and took a bag of vegetables and a Nalgene (1 liter bottle) full of water with me to work and took some throughout the day.  I did this the rest of the work week.  The habit made this much easier.  Getting out of that routine I think is what caused me to lose it on Saturday.  But I got three days of points in, so that is 6 plus the 5 point bonus, for an 11 in each category.

Portion sizes.  Oh man, this is my downfall.  But I paid attention and did pretty good for me this week.  On Wednesday, I went out for lunch with my work buddies and ate like a pig.  On Saturday, I went out for dinner and (between the bread basket, the appetizer, the pasta, and the dessert) couldn’t consider it an adequate portion size!  I have a harder time keeping control at restaurants, the rest of the week I rocked.  8 points plus the bonus is 13.  Caffeine:  I had to have a lot of discipline on a few days but I was able to keep it to 0-2 cups each day and scored a 22 in this category. 

The “Other” category.  Jim’s sit ups inspired me to create a sit up challenge for myself this week.  I shot for 100 per day.  I managed to do that for 4 of the days.  I missed it on Thursday because I watched two hours of Lost.  I missed it on Friday because I was too exhausted from the week and couldn’t make it happen.  I bounced back and got them on Saturday though.  8+5 for bonus is 13.  Add it all up and I got a 110.  If this were football season, a 110 would probably get me the win against my fantasy football opponent, but maybe not depending on their score.  I’ve learned some things this week that will pump up my score, and by the time the new season starts, I’m going to be ready.  I’m going to beat Jeff and Jim at their own game!

 Jim’s note:  get YOUR scorecard here. 

Fantasy Healthball in a Nutshell

Fantasy Healthball:  Football Edition is the diet, nutrition, and exercise program based in fantasy football.  All of the great things about fantasy football (friendly competition, high scoring NFL players, wins and losses, scoring systems, making good decisions, camaraderie) combine to motivate and push you to improve your daily health challenges – and your long term health.  When it is the off-season, you can play a health-only (no fantasy football) game called Training Camp against your friends, family, or yourself.  When it is the regular NFL season, you compete each week against the point total of your fantasy football opponent. 

Here is how it works.  You have a roster that you select health challenges from each week – just like you select your fantasy players for the week.  If you are in a league that selects 7 starters, you select 7 health challenges.  A league with 8 starters selects 8 health challenges, etc.  The health challenges are things like exercise, eating your daily allotment of vegetables, drinking enough water, controlling portion sizes, etc.  Each day you try to complete all your challenges.  You get 2 Healthpoints for each one you do, zero Healthpoints if you don’t do it.  At the end of the week, you add up your score and compare it against your fantasy football opponent.  How did you do against the NFL stars?   Did you let Tom Brady beat you?  Did you work hard enough throughout the week to outscore Manning, Tomlinson, and the crew?  If you outscore your fantasy opponent, you chalk up a win for the week.  You keep track of your fantasy team AND yourself each week as you try to make the playoffs. 

You can lead your fantasy football league but be near the bottom of the standings for Fantasy Healthball, or the opposite.  This adds a whole new dimension to the trash talking, and the friendly competition is a fantastic way to motivate people to improve their healthy lifestyles.  With two out of every three Americans overweight or obese, we are in this together!  Fantasy Healthball is a fun way to pay attention to your health while you are enjoying fantasy sports. 

Fantasy Draft 1992

So back in the late 1980s, fantasy baseball publications began to cater to the ever-growing “sport” following and began fueling the competitive spirit of the fan seeking to gain an edge on their friends for the ensuing season.  And therein lies the primary draw for millions of fantasy players.  We love competition, hanging out with our friends, talking sports, and, above all, the beauty of the trash talk.  Yes, we love to give it to our work-buddy on Monday morning after having thrashed his team by 30 points over the weekend.  Water cooler talk, indeed.  This is water cooler gab on steroids. 

Interestingly, the NFL players website has posted the official rules for the GOPPPL’s 1963 season.  And much in the same competitive spirit drawing us to the game today, these rules pointed out that the winner of the league would receive a cash prize, while the loser, would be presented with a trophy at season’s end “symbolic of the loser’s ineptness.”   This is beautiful!  Where you find fantasy sport, you’re also likely to find some good ol’ fashioned ribbing among friends!

Okay, back to 1992.  My first fantasy draft.  I gleefully selected Barry Sanders in the first round.  Even as a die-hard Chicago Bears fan, I really enjoyed watching Barry run, however it didn’t turn out that he was the 2nd best fantasy player that season.  I certainly felt that he could have, should have, scored more than nine TD’s that season, especially when backs such as Reggie Cobb and Barry Foster (11 TD’s – up from only one the previous year!) were scoring as many.  It hit home to me that predicting what will happen from one season to the next is very difficult.  But that’s part of the fun as well.  You think you know better than everyone else what will happen.  Fantasy football gives you a great outlet to make those choices and implement changes on your team.  And the only one to answer to is yourself. 

All this is why we know fantasy football is such a great system for working to improve your health.  It is about competition.  Making decisions.  Your friends pushing you.  Yes, ribbing you too, but pushing you to keep going.  And when the 2008 NFL season starts up, it will also be about taking on the pros and going for the win each week.  They are exercising and eating healthy to get ready.  And you are too, right?!

Fantasy football just arrived in the last few years, right?

Well, no.  But it has grown exponentially in the last several years.  Many people erroneously assume fantasy football morphed out of the rotisserie baseball scene from the 1980’s.  While the development of fantasy baseball has certainly shaped the current landscape of fantasy football, the origins of fantasy football actually pre-dates fantasy baseball. 

The first fantasy football league was formed in the early 1960’s by sportswriters in the San Francisco Bay Area, along with several Oakland Raiders employees.  Their league was called the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League (GOPPPL).The account recorded in Fantasy Football Index describes that the game was created on a road trip to New York, when Raider’s part owner Wilfred Winkenbach, along with two Oakland Tribune reporters, developed the original idea and a scoring system.  Offensive skill-position players were chosen, with points awarded based directly on their real-game accomplishments on Sunday.  The game system allowed for head-to-head competition, providing wins and losses amongst league teams.  While the league did receive some publicity, and inspired a few other leagues to start, the time-consuming nature of the game did not allow it to find a large following (the Internet would solve that in the future).Interestingly, the highest scoring fantasy player in that inaugural fantasy season of 1962 was George Blanda.  Blanda threw for over 2,800 yards and 27 TD passes and also kicked 11 field goals and 48 extra-points.  Shockingly, he also threw for a whopping 42 interceptions, which in some fantasy scoring methods nowadays, would incur a huge penalty.With the explosion of Rotisserie Baseball, in part because of baseball’s long-standing celebration of the statistics of its game, fantasy sports began to become more widespread through the eighties.  I dove head first in fantasy football in 1992.  But more on that later….