True, it’s past Halloween trick or treat time, but it is that time of year when there are so many treats around it’s tough to avoid temptation. And because so often we take both our pets and our food-related beliefs with us when we jump aboard the holiday treat train, we and the pets may disembark with some extra baggage come the end of the holiday season.
I’ve yet to hear of companion animals who routinely do their own food shopping and prepare their own meals and snacks, so this seems like a good time to explore some preventive as well as post-pudgy food tricks we can use to keep our pets from packing on the pounds.
I’m the last person who would ever nag about the evils of feeding human food to your pet. Provided you eat a healthy diet. And that, as they say, is the rub. Most of us already know those high fat, high calorie, high salt, heavily processed foods are as unhealthy for our pets as they are for us so there’s no use beating that bag of double fudge brownies again. But a much more devious trick awaits pets whose owners are quite conscious about their own weight and diet.
It works like this. Suppose I decide I need to shed the five pounds that mysteriously appeared at menopause and formed thigh-wattles and a squishy pod just below my waist. Until I get the hang of the smaller portions or types of food that will best enable me to do that, each mealtime holds temptations. I broil the chicken breast, but it’s one of those I’d bought to make soup and I was too lazy to remove the skin before I broiled it. I have no intention of eating that skin, any more than I intend to eat those pieces of chicken from around the edges with their little blobs of fat firmly attached.
Meanwhile a chorus of ancestral voices is shouting “Waste no, want not!” and “Clean up your plate!” in my head. Simultaneously, three pairs of bright brown eyes ringed by intent furry faces peer up at me hopefully.
If I look at this scenario strictly from my own perspective, the solution is obvious: give any leftovers that are tempting to the pets. This will ensure my health and placate the demons from my childhood. And it will also please the pets because they’re used to me giving them something and there’s no doubt they’ll happily snarf down these leftovers.
BUT, I know that this is not a healthy choice for the pets, either. So what to do?
Immediately, before temptation has a chance to get its evil hooks into me, I jump up and scrape everything into the garbage or my composting container, fill the sink with hot water and dish detergent, and pop my plate and eating utensils into it. Out of sight, out of mind. Problem solved. Then the pets and I each get some apple with a bit of peanut butter or some fat-free vanilla yogurt to celebrate their narrow escape from my lack of will power.
Do the same with all those holidays treats. Share the healthy ones and freeze any less healthy ones to dole out in small amounts after the holidays when over-indulgence isn’t so easy. What could be more of a treat than that?
Another approach to this dilemma is to put aside a small piece of something healthy at the beginning of the meal, sharing the best rather than the dregs, just as we would (hopefully) do for any family member.
“But the pets love all those special once-at-year treats!” you might well say and I’d be the last person to argue with that, either. But just because we—and they—like a certain food doesn’t automatically make those foods good for us. Trust me, if that were the case, my refrigerator would be filled with Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and homemade chocolate chip cookies rather than fruits and veggies.
A second trick life plays on our pets is that, as they age, it takes fewer calories to maintain their optimum body weight, fewer still if they’re also less active and/or spayed or neutered. Aging changes also may make it more difficult for them digest treats that caused them no problems when they were younger. Consequently, don’t lock your pet into one kind and amount of treat to which you give a strong emotional charge when the animal is young. I recall one dachshund who developed pancreatic problems whose owners had created such an emotional ritual around feeding rich cookies and chips that the dog would beg for them, even though trying to digest them caused her to practically double up with pain.
How much better it would have been if those folks had offered their pet a wide variety of nutritious treats in different amounts! When this trick is used, treats that the animal can’t handle for some reason later in life can easily be dropped from the line-up. Similarly, amounts easily can be cut back as the pet’s caloric requirement drops. While always important, this is particularly so during the holiday season when it’s much easier to feed our pets unwisely because the emotional charge attached to certain foods may be so strong.
A third trick that’s especially beneficial if you’re trying to get or keep weight off your pet this holiday season to make a list of all the benefits you can think of for doing this and writing each one on a small flash card. These can be the obvious—prolong your pet’s life, reduce joint pain associated with overweight, increase playfulness and sense of well-being. But don’t forget the more personal ones, too. For example, maybe you bought your pet an expensive toy he’s too pudgy to care about or a coat that’s just a little bit too snug for him to wear comfortably. Or maybe you want your pet to lose weight so your brother won’t call her Miss Piggy again when he visits next summer.
Whatever has meaning to you, write it down on a card. Then before you give your pet that spoonful of candied yams or pumpkin pie with whipped cream, go through your cards one by one and read all the reasons why you want your pet to lose weight. If you still feel like giving that treat or the same amount of it, go ahead and do it without feeling guilty. But you may find, as many people do, that by the time you finish going through your cards, the desire to succumb to emotion-driven temptation has been replaced by a knowledge-based commitment to your pet’s health.
Another good holiday weight-control trick if you do treat-training with your pet is to take a break during the holidays and reward any correct responses with a hug and/or praise instead. True, we all know the treat is supposed to be out of the process within 2 weeks. But sometimes we lack faith in the animal’s ability to learn and/or ours to teach and consequently hate to give up that edible crutch. Other times we go from training one new behavior to another and from one class to another so that the dog is always getting treats for learning some new command. In that situation, the possibility exists that we’re teaching the dog to learn for food rather than to sit, stay, or come. If that connection is made, the treat takes on one of those pesky emotional charges that can actually undermine the animal’s behavior in the long run. At the same time, giving those treats can become a habit for us which may cause us to keep giving treats even though the animal no longer needs them. That, in turn, will prevent the animal from internalizing the new behaviors as well as contribute to unhealthy food-emotion connections and weight gain.
A six-week treat-fast will enable you to determine what new behaviors your pet has actually learned/internalized and which are treat-dependent and thus not reliable. Another benefit of this is the wonderful feeling you get when your pet obeys simply because it’s the right thing to do, i.e., the behavior becomes self-rewarding. As long as that food (like punishment) remains a part of the process, the animal can never experience this, and we can never experience the joy that comes from enabling the animal to do that.
The “ideal” holiday gift is often tritely touted as one that keeps on giving. But the wrong kind of holiday treats or excess amounts of them will keep giving, too, but not in a loving way. Luckily we can avoid doing this by consistently making any necessary changes in our treat-related beliefs this holiday season. By doing that, we not only give our pets a gift of that will last a lifetime, we help ensure the quality and duration of their lives, too.
If you have any comments regarding subject matter, favorite links, or anything you’d like to see discussed on or added to this site, please let me know at mm@mmilani.com.
True, it’s past Halloween trick or treat time, but it is that time of year when there are so many treats around it’s tough to avoid temptation. And because so often we take both our pets and our food-related beliefs with us when we jump aboard the holiday treat train, we and the pets may disembark with some extra baggage come the end of the holiday season.
I’ve yet to hear of companion animals who routinely do their own food shopping and prepare their own meals and snacks, so this seems like a good time to explore some preventive as well as post-pudgy food tricks we can use to keep our pets from packing on the pounds.
I’m the last person who would ever nag about the evils of feeding human food to your pet. Provided you eat a healthy diet. And that, as they say, is the rub. Most of us already know those high fat, high calorie, high salt, heavily processed foods are as unhealthy for our pets as they are for us so there’s no use beating that bag of double fudge brownies again. But a much more devious trick awaits pets whose owners are quite conscious about their own weight and diet.
It works like this. Suppose I decide I need to shed the five pounds that mysteriously appeared at menopause and formed thigh-wattles and a squishy pod just below my waist. Until I get the hang of the smaller portions or types of food that will best enable me to do that, each mealtime holds temptations. I broil the chicken breast, but it’s one of those I’d bought to make soup and I was too lazy to remove the skin before I broiled it. I have no intention of eating that skin, any more than I intend to eat those pieces of chicken from around the edges with their little blobs of fat firmly attached.
Meanwhile a chorus of ancestral voices is shouting “Waste no, want not!” and “Clean up your plate!” in my head. Simultaneously, three pairs of bright brown eyes ringed by intent furry faces peer up at me hopefully.
If I look at this scenario strictly from my own perspective, the solution is obvious: give any leftovers that are tempting to the pets. This will ensure my health and placate the demons from my childhood. And it will also please the pets because they’re used to me giving them something and there’s no doubt they’ll happily snarf down these leftovers.
BUT, I know that this is not a healthy choice for the pets, either. So what to do?
Immediately, before temptation has a chance to get its evil hooks into me, I jump up and scrape everything into the garbage or my composting container, fill the sink with hot water and dish detergent, and pop my plate and eating utensils into it. Out of sight, out of mind. Problem solved. Then the pets and I each get some apple with a bit of peanut butter or some fat-free vanilla yogurt to celebrate their narrow escape from my lack of will power.
Do the same with all those holidays treats. Share the healthy ones and freeze any less healthy ones to dole out in small amounts after the holidays when over-indulgence isn’t so easy. What could be more of a treat than that?
Another approach to this dilemma is to put aside a small piece of something healthy at the beginning of the meal, sharing the best rather than the dregs, just as we would (hopefully) do for any family member.
“But the pets love all those special once-at-year treats!” you might well say and I’d be the last person to argue with that, either. But just because we—and they—like a certain food doesn’t automatically make those foods good for us. Trust me, if that were the case, my refrigerator would be filled with Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and homemade chocolate chip cookies rather than fruits and veggies.
A second trick life plays on our pets is that, as they age, it takes fewer calories to maintain their optimum body weight, fewer still if they’re also less active and/or spayed or neutered. Aging changes also may make it more difficult for them digest treats that caused them no problems when they were younger. Consequently, don’t lock your pet into one kind and amount of treat to which you give a strong emotional charge when the animal is young. I recall one dachshund who developed pancreatic problems whose owners had created such an emotional ritual around feeding rich cookies and chips that the dog would beg for them, even though trying to digest them caused her to practically double up with pain.
How much better it would have been if those folks had offered their pet a wide variety of nutritious treats in different amounts! When this trick is used, treats that the animal can’t handle for some reason later in life can easily be dropped from the line-up. Similarly, amounts easily can be cut back as the pet’s caloric requirement drops. While always important, this is particularly so during the holiday season when it’s much easier to feed our pets unwisely because the emotional charge attached to certain foods may be so strong.
A third trick that’s especially beneficial if you’re trying to get or keep weight off your pet this holiday season to make a list of all the benefits you can think of for doing this and writing each one on a small flash card. These can be the obvious—prolong your pet’s life, reduce joint pain associated with overweight, increase playfulness and sense of well-being. But don’t forget the more personal ones, too. For example, maybe you bought your pet an expensive toy he’s too pudgy to care about or a coat that’s just a little bit too snug for him to wear comfortably. Or maybe you want your pet to lose weight so your brother won’t call her Miss Piggy again when he visits next summer.
Whatever has meaning to you, write it down on a card. Then before you give your pet that spoonful of candied yams or pumpkin pie with whipped cream, go through your cards one by one and read all the reasons why you want your pet to lose weight. If you still feel like giving that treat or the same amount of it, go ahead and do it without feeling guilty. But you may find, as many people do, that by the time you finish going through your cards, the desire to succumb to emotion-driven temptation has been replaced by a knowledge-based commitment to your pet’s health.
Another good holiday weight-control trick if you do treat-training with your pet is to take a break during the holidays and reward any correct responses with a hug and/or praise instead. True, we all know the treat is supposed to be out of the process within 2 weeks. But sometimes we lack faith in the animal’s ability to learn and/or ours to teach and consequently hate to give up that edible crutch. Other times we go from training one new behavior to another and from one class to another so that the dog is always getting treats for learning some new command. In that situation, the possibility exists that we’re teaching the dog to learn for food rather than to sit, stay, or come. If that connection is made, the treat takes on one of those pesky emotional charges that can actually undermine the animal’s behavior in the long run. At the same time, giving those treats can become a habit for us which may cause us to keep giving treats even though the animal no longer needs them. That, in turn, will prevent the animal from internalizing the new behaviors as well as contribute to unhealthy food-emotion connections and weight gain.
A six-week treat-fast will enable you to determine what new behaviors your pet has actually learned/internalized and which are treat-dependent and thus not reliable. Another benefit of this is the wonderful feeling you get when your pet obeys simply because it’s the right thing to do, i.e., the behavior becomes self-rewarding. As long as that food (like punishment) remains a part of the process, the animal can never experience this, and we can never experience the joy that comes from enabling the animal to do that.
The “ideal” holiday gift is often tritely touted as one that keeps on giving. But the wrong kind of holiday treats or excess amounts of them will keep giving, too, but not in a loving way. Luckily we can avoid doing this by consistently making any necessary changes in our treat-related beliefs this holiday season. By doing that, we not only give our pets a gift of that will last a lifetime, we help ensure the quality and duration of their lives, too.
If you have any comments regarding subject matter, favorite links, or anything you’d like to see discussed on or added to this site, please let me know at mm@mmilani.com.