WWQP Bulletin Board Chat

DIET & SHADOW'S MOJO

Since I started up this whole diet thing and have been up and down ever since resulting in a net loss of about 2# I went back to Weight Watchers. Having reached my lifetime goal back in early 1978 I've had an ongoing but infrequent relationship with said organization. The last try resulted in tears and a vow never to weigh or measure another morsel of food. In recent years I've just bought larger and larger clothes and it began to look as though that had become a lifetime approach. Sooo, I went back about ten days ago. I love the new "Core" program and the first week lost 4.4#! I'm never hungry unless I am careless about eating at a regular interval and with my recent onset of reactive hypoglycemia I get into blood sugar trouble when I delay eating. That loss by the way occurred despite a fall from grace one evening at a lovely place (the place I took the boys after their concert) and ordered merely a sandwich as I wasn't too hungry. Had the waitress asked me if I wanted fries I'd have said no as is my practice. However, there they were on the place all crispy and shiny with grease. After eating the sandwich which wasn't nearly as good as the dinner I'd had the last time I just couldn't resist. The evening was lovely and I was engrossed in Harry Potter and they just disappeared before I knew it. That cost me dearly.

Shadow has been slowing down rather rapidly since spring and I've been sad about it but attributing it to age. She turned 11 6/30 and I was just sadly accepting it as inevitable. I'm certainly not acting like a pup either. Last week I took her to the vet (Aunt Harriet to Shadow) for a teeth cleaning which hadn't been done in a bit over two years. When I picked her up at closing time the receptionist told me that Harriet had found that two back teeth were badly decayed and infected to boot. She extracted them, cleaned out the sockets and perscribed a week of antibiotic. She'd had a pain shot when the anesthesia wore off so she was extremely goofy and I had to lift her out of the SUV and give her a boost up the three steps into the house. She went straight to bed, refused water or ice and conked out. The next morning she was still very slightly wobbly. I figured her usual dry food would be hard to handle and I didn't want to start any bleeding. So the previous evening I beat up a raw egg with some skim milk and soaked some of her usual food until it was soggy. She thought that was fine and slurped it up with tail wagging all the time. Ever since then she has been her old self with an almost insatiable appetite for chasing the tennis ball and making Mom climb up the mountain. It's so wonderful having her back. The moral of the story, children, is that if you have and aging dog or cat be sure to have those teeth closely checked regularly. Harriet has told me in the past that the ones that end up losing all their teeth are mostly the ones "with a crappy diet". That's why the dry bagged food is best in the long run. Read the ingredients list too. Gun Dog Magazine claims that while meat isn't sufficient it is necessary and should be the first named ingredient and that corn doesn't digest as thoroughly as other grains thus leaving more stuff in the yard and failure to absorb the nutrients therein. Rice, barley etc. are superior.

More words on the heat. Friday coming home from stitch and bitch in Franklin it was, according to my readout in the car, an exterior temperature of 106*F. It was a mere 95* in the shadiest part of my driveway when I got home at almost 5PM. We're supposed to have a cold spell next week of highs in the mid 80s. Been keeping the AC on 24 hrs a day and I seldom did that in FL. I have discovered that my allergies are much less of a problem with that arrangement so despite the expense I intend to keep it up for a while.

Jane in NC

posted by Jane in NC @ 11:45 AM