The Dog is Making Me Fat

Whenever you add a dog to your family, you have to start as you mean to continue. You have to make it clear that you are the Boss. You have to make this point more regularly and obviously with some dogs than with other dogs. Some dogs shrug and say “OK, you're the boss” before flopping down in their beds with a chew toy. Other dogs are like surly teenagers. “You're not the boss of me!”

Toby is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, but since he has shown some signs of being a dominant dog and he's relatively young, we're being careful to remind him consistently and clearly that we're the boss. One of the simple ways to remind the dog is the control of food. Some trainers say you should always eat before you feed your dog and you should make him wait until you tell him to eat.

Fair enough, but the convenient and logical times to feed the dog don't always neatly coincide with my mealtimes. The vet said to feed him once in the evening to get him on a proper “walkies” schedule. But I was worried about bloat, especially since the car situation was dicey in the early days. (It's not like bloat is something you can treat at home and the vet is 18 miles away.) So I started feeding him twice in the evenings, one cup of food each time, with about two hours between meals. It's a good schedule from the “walkies” point of view, since he goes nearly precisely at 7.20 every morning.

But I need to eat something before I feed him. Just something small and easy – usually I just grab a slice of cheese from the fridge. You usually hear about people losing weight when they get dogs. I think I may end up being the first person in the history of active dogs to actually gain weight. And it's all the dog's fault.