Fantasy Football Season Over?

So as I’ve mentioned here many times, Jeff has been playing fantasy football since George Halas was his starting wide receiver, but 2008 was my first year.  Of course, I found it to be very addictive and a great way to keep me to my health goals while simultaneously playing Fantasy Healthball.  As a rookie,  I made plenty of rookie mistakes like starting players who ended up sitting out at the last minute with an injury.  It also took me a long time to figure out that my Yahoo! league was generous awarding kick and punt return points.  I noticed my competition with a defensive back that got one tackle but 20 points!  A-ha, the defensive back is also the kick returner!  Anyway, I got a lot smarter as the year went on. 

My league, a total points league rather than head to head, had twelve teams and I stayed the same or moved up each week.  I went from something like 12th to 9th to 8th to 6th to 5th to 4th and stayed in fourth for several weeks.  I ended up finishing fourth in the league which I was pretty proud of for my first year.   Congrats to “Go Bengals Go” who won our league.  My greatest “unknown” find was Joshua Cribbs who seems to play every position for the Clevelend Browns.  In my league, Cribbs scored plenty of points.  Unfortunately, my big name QB, Carson Palmer, was out pretty much all season with an injury but I discovered “unknown” Tyler Thigpen and Thiggy is my new hero.    

From now on, I’m playing in head to head leagues which is more common and much more compatible with Fantasy Healthball.   Jeff was in a head to head league and will write about his experience.  As I was in a fantasy football points league, for Fantasy Healthball purposes I competed each week against the average score.  That was fun, but not as fun as it would have been to go up head to head against a weekly opponent, which I’ll highly recommend from now on and I’ll certainly do in the 2009 NFL season. 

In Fantasy Healthball, I finished 15-1, a great season by any measure.  And I sure worked my butt off (literally and figuratively, of course!) to finish with that record.  I lost about 10 pounds of body fat through the season and still feel in the best shape of my life at 40 years old.  This morning, I rode my mountain bike up about a 2,250 foot elevation in a short period of time, something I COULD NOT have done before I started playing Fantasy Healthball.

We hope you had similar results.  Send us an email or comment on our blog to let us know.  Meanwhile, Jeff and I will be playing the NFL.com playoff challenge to continue our Healthball season.  — Jim Ballard

Calories Made Easy – How Many Calories Do I need?

<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…>

If you are the quantitative type, you can calculate an estimate of how many calories you need per day and then how many you need to cut to lose a particular amount of weight over time.  An easy way to do this is to use an on-line calculator.  Just type “Daily Calorie Need calculator” into your search engine and you’ll have your choice of thousands, or click on one of these:  American Cancer Society to 24-Hour Fitness centers to the Mayo Clinic.

As an example, let’s say Leroy is a 40-year old, 200-pound man who is 5”11.”  Leroy has a light activity level as he has a desk job and doesn’t exercise much.  He would need around 2,500 calories per day (when we say “need,” we mean how much would be needed to maintain current body weight).  Since a pound of body fat equals 3,500 calories, he’d have to cut 500 calories a day to lose a pound per week.  So if Leroy wants to lose a pound a week, he could cut his calories back to 2,000 a day.  Leroy could also chose a healthier route such as only cutting his calories back to 2,250 but also exercising to burn the other 250. 

A second example, Juanita, is a 25-year old, 130-pound woman who is 5’4.”  Juanita has a moderate activity level because she likes to jog a few times a week.  She would need about 2,000 calories per day.  Again, a pound of body fat equals 3,500 calories, so it takes a cut of 500 calories a day to lose a pound per week.  If Juanita wants to lose a pound a week, she could cut her calories to 1,500 a day.  A better plan for Juanita might be to cut her calories to 1,750 per day and work in swimming on days that she doesn’t jog for the other 250. 

But maybe a pound a week isn’t Juanita’s goal.  Perhaps she only wants to drop five pounds for her wedding in six months.  Using the same information above, she would only need to cut a little under 100 calories a day, cutting her total calories to just under 1,900 per day.  She’d drop the weight over a longer period of time and be in the shape she wants to be for her wedding.

Our Fantasy Healthball challenge for you is to track the calories you eat for a week.  Okay, let’s make it even more simple.  Track them for a day.  Compare that against your daily need from an on-line calculator.  Does your calorie lifestyle point towards gaining, losing, or maintaining weight?  If it is gaining beyond what is healthy for you, check out our Exercise section for ways to drop some of those unwanted calories.  — Jim Ballard

Serving Sizes Made Easy

Our last post clearly illustrates the importance of paying very close attention to “serving size.”  The nutritional information on the side of a package doesn’t necessarily equal the total amount of food or drink.  It relates to one serving.  For example, I just pulled out of my pantry a bag of pretzels.  To be specific, they are Trader Joe’s Low Fat Honey Whole Wheat Pretzel Sticks.  The nutrition label says “Calories 110.”  Don’t be fooled to think there are a total of 110 calories in the bag, because the information applies to each serving.  The label says each serving size is 10 sticks and there are 12 servings in the bag.  In other words, every 10 sticks (not the whole bag) equal 110 calories. 

Don’t let serving sizes trick you.  A box of twelve fat-free cookies might say 50 calories per serving.  That doesn’t sound too bad until you see that serving size is only one cookie.  That means each cookie is 50 calories, which can add up fast. 

Serving sizes, as well as calories and fat, is part of why fast food has a deservedly bad rap.  When you super-size it, you super-size the calories and fat.  You just don’t need it and it really isn’t good enough to be worth it.  When you are going to allow yourself something that is high in calories or fat, make sure it is an exceptionally wonderful food or drink, not just an extra fistful of French fries.  

How many calories your body needs to be active varies, of course, from person to person.  It depends on such things as your normal level of activity and your metabolism.  A truck driver will generally need fewer calories than a construction laborer, if they both have similar bodies. 

It is all about calorie in, calorie out.  If you take in more than you need, without burning them off, you will gain weight.  You’ll lose weight if you burn off more than you need, without overdoing it.  More on this in our next post!  — Jim Ballard

Eat Smart: Fat, Sugar, Sodium, Calories

Behold the magical food:  fat-free!  Fat free?  So does that mean healthy?  Unfortunately, as we’ve said before, fat isn’t the whole picture.  These days you can find fat-free cakes, brownies, and cookies at the grocery store.  However, take a look at the calorie count, and the sugar and sodium.   Calories rule.  When you are trying to lose weight, it is about calorie in, calorie out. 

Fat-free foods may be a part of a healthy diet, but cannot be eaten with reckless abandon if you are getting hit with too many calories. 

Another ingredient I personally like to avoid is high-fructose corn syrup.  For one reason, the words themselves scare me.  Sounds to me like it is sugar that is extremely high in sugar.  Since we are not doctors, we’re not going to get into the studies that link high-fructose corn syrup to weight gain, high blood pressure, and other health problems, but instead we’ll let some examples of foods high in high-fructose corn syrup speak for themselves:  soda, candy, cookies, cakes, jam, jellies, pancake syrup, sweetened cereals.  Sounds like those fall into the “use very sparingly” category to us. 

Sparingly, by the way, is “once in a while” not “I’ll only drink two sodas today instead of five.”

You may also want to keep your eye on sodium content as it has been linked to high blood pressure.  The daily limit is set at 1,500-2,300 milligrams.  Though this may sound like a high number, sodium seems to be in everything.  According to their website, a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup has 890 milligrams of sodium per serving, a half a cup of condensed soup.  The standard sized can says it contains 2.5 servings.  That means eating one can of soup gets you just about to the daily limit.  So don’t even think about those salted crackers on top!  At Fantasy Healthball’s Diet and Nutrition section, we aren’t militant about what you can and can’t eat.  We just want you to be smart about it by knowing what is going in your mouth and what it is going to do once it gets in your body.  - Jim Ballard

Weight Loss – Don’t Get Too Hung Up on the Numbers

A post from Andrew, the FHB Spokesmodel:

Football is a game of numbers. We all know that. The glory goes to those with completions, receptions, rushes, yards gained, fumbles recovered, interceptions, tackles, field goals made, and above all else, touchdowns. When we look at the box score and the breakdown, those are the things we all see. However, they are only a part of the game. Statistics don’t capture everything that happens on the field. So, like the reserve player on special teams who makes a great block on a kick off to spring a return guy or the offensive lineman who opens an alley  for a speedy running back to dart through, I was recently reminded that numbers aren’t something that tells the whole story. Here’s why.

All summer long I have been riding my bike regularly, building my endurance and speed as I went and watching my clothes get looser and looser. My riding even expanded to the point where I have ridden as many as five to six days a week and attempted a hard century in Maine (chronicled in an October entry). All during that time, I was watching, and perhaps watching too much, as my weight melted away, starting at 325 pounds at the end of May 2008 and dropping to around 240 pounds. Wow, I thought. 85 pounds is a lot of weight, that’s more than two five gallon jugs of spring water. I actually began to be concerned that the weight was coming of TOO quickly, because knowing that muscle is heavier than fat and that my legs are now much more muscular than before, the fat loss would have been even greater. So, I followed the logical route and bought a second scale. WHAM! A reading of around 285 pounds. 

I was about to be discouraged, but then I really thought about it and what it means. I have lost 40+ pound of fat and gained some serious muscle in six months by following a good exercise and diet regimen. I rode a difficult and hilly century in Maine a year before I was planning on doing one and weighed 40 pound more than I actually thought I did! I am riding strongly at 285 pounds and doing at that weight what my brain thought it was doing at 240 pounds. I have great objectives to work on over the winter and into 2009. Don’t get too hung up on the numbers. Stats are nice but it is what you actually do that contributes to your personal victory over flab and moves you towards the better health bowl game.  — Andrew