my life, my pace

So I took my dog to the vet today for his annual checkup and vaccine boosters in anticipation of not having the time to do it later in the month. Now I’ve been noticing that he’s getting a little chubby, but my husband doesn’t believe me and has not cut back on how much he feeds him. Of course, my husband has not once gone to the vet with me and has never seen the charts they have in the vet’s office showing what a healthy dog should look like and my attempts to describe these charts and my concerns to him fell on deaf ears. I knew that my dog had filled out a bit, but nothing could prepare me for how much weight he actually gained: a whole 10 lbs! He was 50 lbs before (which was his ideal weight or “ideal dog” in the chart below), so that means he gained 20% of his original weight! If I were to gain 20% of my current weight, I would have to gain almost 20 lbs! The vet now classifies my dog as “overweight” bordering on “obese” according to the chart below!* Talk about embarrassing. I spent the remainder of the vet visit trying to blame my husband (rightfully so, I might add) for my dog’s condition. But it didn’t change the fact that I was the one who got lectured instead of the person who deserved it. And to add insult to injury, my husband just keeps saying, “we can fix it” and “all we need to do is make him exercise more” instead of admitting that he screwed up and that it’s going to be hard to fix (and that he should have listened to me, as always). If obesity were so easy to fix, would we have such an epidemic going on right now? Hardly. So I really want to shove his stupid everything is fixable attitude somewhere where I’ll never have to see it again. When will he see that it’s much better to just not break things in the first place?

*You may wonder how I could possibly have not noticed that my dog is about to become obese, but it is rather hard because he’s super furry and I was in denial.

Image from: http://users.tpg.com.au/choclab/img/dog_weight_chart.jpg