We are approaching a year since we got Buddy. When he came to us he was only a year old, so sort of half grown. He weighed 5.5 pounds and survived on a diet of kibble and some canned dog food that his prior owners preferred. Kim has always prepared meals for our dogs. It is something she likes to do as part of bonding with her dogs. Both Cecil and Betty very much appreciated it. When we got Buddy, it didn’t seem to take too long to acclimate him to living with us, but I think he was relatively indifferent to food. It was a big difference between him and either Cecil or Betty, especially so with Betty, who, despite her scrawny appearance, had a limitless appetite that only an ex-street-dog could possess. We assumed Buddy cared less about food because he was so small. Buddy was not opposed to the food Kim prepared specially for him, but perhaps he was just so overwhelmed by the new surroundings, he wasn’t going crazy for it. He also wasn’t into begging food from me, which was something I was very used to with Cecil and Betty. But being who I am, and Buddy being a curious puppy was mildly interested in whatever I was choosing to eat. I know that one should not feed dogs human food, but giving our dogs snacks is something that I seem hard-wired to do. So, I started giving Buddy little nibbles of this or that. And, not surprisingly, he liked it and started to expect it. He’s not demanding the way Betty was, but he is certainly persistent and has perfected that longing stare that says he wants to taste whatever I’m eating. Part of the problem is that I eat one or two meals a day in the living room, sitting on the sofa in the sunshine (where I am at this very moment). That allows him to be at lap level where the beggin’ is easy.
Part of what is causing this problem to take shape (so to speak), is that my appetite is seriously waning. I’ve had a LapBand now for 18 years and it continues to do its job of restricting my intake of food, but that seems less to be the issue than the fact that food just loses its interest with me after a few bites. Kim and I have both noted the tendency and neither of us knows if its just part of aging (as one so often hears) or if it is due to our respective bariatric status (me with the LapBand and Kim with her Gastric Bypass…by way of a less successful LapBand). I tend to think its a combination of the two things because it is clearly become more the case as time passes. We are at the point where we berate one another after a meal out if we have forgotten to think ahead and order something we both will eat since we tend to send back a lot of food these days to the kitchen. We have both forsaken our membership in the clean plate club, which is a pretty significant change for us both from our youth…hence the need for the initial bariatric procedures. So my loss ends up being Buddy’s gain.
After about six months with us, Buddy went for a vet check-up and weighed in at 6.5 pounds. The vet said that was an ideal weight for him and that we should try to keep him at that level. Most of the acclimatization to begging for and getting table scraps started after that, and he’s such a little dog that it never seemed like he was getting porky or anything. His digestion was pretty regular and he rarely was off his feed. Being a little dog, he will have days when he doesn’t eat his breakfast or dinner, but we have figured that has more to do with his taste preferences and Kim learning what he likes and does not like so much. Most days he’s a member in good standing of the clean plate club unless we are leaving him with Colean. I’m betting that having a bunch of other dogs around who are generally much bigger than you and curious about the good-smelling Kim stuff in your bowl, might well cause you to loose your appetite or at least curtail it.
Lately, Kim has begun chastising me about the amount of snacks I give Buddy. She keeps reminding me that he is a very little dog and the fact that he wants a snack should not automatically drive me to feed him a snack. He, like most dogs, gets fed twice a day at 8am and 5pm. While he is perfectly able to beg right after eating either meal, making it clear that it is less hunger driven than impulse control driven, he seems at his most anxious for a snack at midday if he sees me having lunch. I’m not sure why we feel we need lunch and dogs do not. I’m betting that that has less to do with anatomy than species psychology and habit. But I have clearly trained Buddy to especially want a snack at noontime. Where Kim thinks a snack is a one-time treat, I think of it as a midday meal that gets served piecemeal. I may not give it to him in his bowl, but I do tend to want him to get something like his fill. Clearly this is all about my eating dysfunction, which I have had since youth, but which has had a PVC strap around it for the past eighteen years. I am a Jewish mother when it comes to our dogs…I feed them to show them I love them.
The end result is pretty much exactly what you would expect. Kim took Buddy to the vet the other day for his checkup. It seems he has gained another pound and is now at 7.5 pounds. If we take the vet’s prior comment that his fighting weight is 6.5 pounds, that means he is 15% overweight. By human BMI standards (not sure if that works for dogs since height is certainly not the same sort of factor), a 10-20% excess is overweight and anything over 20% excess is obese. My whole adult life has been spent beyond these parameters by varying degrees, but I have never had the pleasure to just be overweight. Buddy is now technically overweight and its mostly because of me. I liked what the vet said to Kim about it. She reckoned that it was harder to change the habits of someone like me than to just modify the dinner menu for the dog. In other words, if Rich is going to feed him X amount of calories, then just make his dinner that much less. Kim was less thrilled about that approach. She has commanded me to give him fewer and smaller handouts.
I am doing that for sure at breakfast and dinner, but lunch remains the most sensitive meal and certainly the one that Buddy wants the most snacks to replace. I am choosing to eat at the kitchen counter rather than the living room as a way to eliminate the ease of begging and giving in to the begging. It seems to work. I am far less smitten when Buddy is at my ankles than when he is at my lap. His drilling stare gets to me less at the counter.
Just yesterday our 80+ year old neighbor Winston stopped by. Buddy did his wild man barking routine since he doesn’t often see Winston. While Buddy was scampering around his feet, Winston commented that Buddy was getting chubby. I naturally said he had just had a groom and that his hair was poofed out. I am nothing if not a good weight denier at this stage of life.. But when Winston left, I had a long talk with Buddy telling him the perils of chubbiness. I can’t tell if any of that got through, and why should it? My mother was the world’s ranking nutritionist for her many years at the UN and that never stopped me from getting to obesity. I will need to treat chubby Buddy to fewer treats….that’s all there is to it.