Image: supplied.
Sadie is my dog. I just want to get that out of the way so you don’t feel like I tricked you into thinking I had met a new diet guru or hot personal trainer.
Actually, Sadie is more than my dog. She is my fur baby, my fourth child, my beloved. She’s also suffering from a weight gain of epic proportions, thanks to her time with a dog sitter who has a history of expressing love to pets by cooking for them.
RELATED: 11 reasons why dogs are good for your health.
I won’t name and shame the dog sitter as she didn’t mean any harm; however, she was completely incapable of following the very simple instructions I had left with her, which went something like this:
Sadie eats once a day, at night, just dry food. She can have a maximum of two treats during the day, one bone and one cheese stick.
I said it out loud, I emailed it, and I even repeated it moments before we left. We even weighed Sadie on the day of our departure. She was a slim 12.9 kilos; as an eight-month-old female cocker spaniel who is not yet de-sexed, it was the perfect weight.
We arrived home and weighed her straight away. She weighed 14.1 kilos. That’s a weight gain of 1.2 kilos, which didn’t seem like much to me.
RELATED: “The annoying thing that happened when my husband and I decided to be diet buddies.”
Then my husband put it in perspective. "That’s an enormous amount of weight for a little dog to gain in five days. If you look at it in percentages, that’s a nine per cent increase in body weight. If I had put that much weight on in five days it would be the equivalent of ten kilos! What if we’d been gone for two weeks?"
