The Wrong Dog Blog

Next, an update on my own food situation: I am phasing in a hypoglycemia diet. I did have a whole pint of Chocolate Obsession, but I had it slowly, over about four hours. I am not going to restock the “ice cream” when I run out. I am mixing sugared spaghetti sauce with unsugared. I’m eating small amounts of unsugared peanut butter. I’ve e-mailed my doctor about leaky gut syndrome to see what he thinks and whether I should go in for an appointment.

Meanwhile, I shall get you back to the dog part of the Wrong Dog Blog, with a reworked e-mail from last November (reworked to include HTML tags and WDB blog aliases ^_^) about when I got Sunny his new woofus kibble. Enjoy!

11/10/06

I recently got a raise. (Hi, Bianca! ^_^) I decided that I would start getting dog food delivered rather than having to carry it home, which in my opinion ranks as the worst thing about having a dog. I’ll scoop poop and go for WALKIES!!! in freezing rain, but don’t ask me to carry twenty-pound (or even ten-pound) bags of dog food for fifteen or more minutes by foot and then up the many stairs to my apartment!

Being as Sunny has been eating a store brand since I went into the hospital last spring, getting the food delivered in would necessitate a switch in dog food brands. I figured that if I was going to switch him to another food, I might as well make it a good one: the high-end dog foods weren’t that much more expensive than the lower-end ones at the food-delivery site. Although her vets attributed her longevity to the amount of exercise Augusta got as an uncaged rabbit, I have always believed that the key was her diet, and I want Sunny to live as long for a dog as she did for a rabbit. (Shameless plug: for those of you with small herbivores for friends, go to http://www.oxbowhay.com and protect their kidneys from burning out sooner than they must!)

The problem is that everyone disagrees about what is best for a dog to eat. There are the raw-food people: feed the dog something as close to wild-caught dead-animal as possible. There are the no-grain people: feed the dog something that is nearly entirely meat. There are the low-protein people: if the dog is of a weak-kidney breed (Sunny is), feed the dog something that is nearly entirely not meat. There are the rounded-diet people: feed the dog meat, grains, vegetables, and fruit. There are the organic people: feed the dog one of the above, but make sure it’s organic! There is a baffling array of choices, and I wasn’t sure what to do.

Fortunately, I have a personal friend who is a veterinarian. (Hi, Michiru!) I went to Dr. M with my confusion and asked her advice, as I so often do with critter issues (it used to be bunny advice; now it’s woofy advice!). Dr. M answered at length, with the bottom line being a well-rounded, as-organic-as-possible diet. I had mentioned Wellness as one of the brands I was looking at, and she said she had heard good things about it. Even within the Wellness brand there are an array of choices, and I finally narrowed it down to Wellness Super5 Mix Chicken Dry Dog Food. No, that it comes in a purple bag did not influence my decision. It’s just that it’s well rounded, organic, and based on chicken, which has historically done well for Sunny. The last time I gave him a lamb-based food, he didn’t keep it down, and I am a little nervous about going so exotic as the fish-and-sweet-potato mix. Sunny has a sensitive stomach, and I don’t want any more barfing incidents than I absolutely must face.

So as his last bag of the store brand started getting low, I ordered. The food would take a week to ten days to arrive, and I needed to still have some of the old food to mix with the new food, to transition the little guy gradually, one of the few points on which all the dog-feeding pundits agree. I got six two-pound bags because with the sale they were cheaper than two six-pound bags, and it would be easier to figure out exactly how much food Sunny ate in six weeks, which is the longest you should keep an organic food after the bag is opened. The shipment arrived yesterday.

Sunny gets fed two to three small meals a day. Yes, I’ve heard the feed-’em-once-a-day line, but Sunny has maintained a healthy body weight on the many-meals plan; at his last visit, his vet pronounced his body condition as ideal in both weight and musculature. I always feed him after I’ve eaten a meal, and so after breakfast this morning, I put in about two-thirds of what I usually feed of his old dog food, sprinkled a little Wellness on top, and mixed them together. Sunny was curious about the new bag, so I gave him one piece while I was about it. He dropped it on the floor, examined it thoroughly, decided it was actually food, and ate it. (Why do all my nonhuman companions always doubt that what I give them is actually food? Augusta used to do the same thing. The frustrating thing is that Sunny often decides it’s not food!) I put his bowl down on the kitchen floor, where it usually resides.

He went over and, as is very unusual for him, started crunching right away. Usually he spends at least a couple minutes bouncing his nose off of his food. This is his attempt to cache his food, hide it so that any marauding scavengers won’t find it and he can come back and eat it at his leisure. I’ve told him that I’m the only other one in the apartment who eats food and that I’m not interested in his, but he’s unimpressed. If I am foolish enough to leave a plastic grocery bag where he can get it, he’ll use it to cover the food dish. (In a satisfying “Stupid Pet Trick” moment, I carried out a successful demonstration for Joh, when Sunny was bouncing his nose and I dropped a plastic grocery bag nearby.) Often he won’t eat his food right away and will only come back an hour or so later, or sometimes even skip the meal entirely and only eat it later in the day. He is more likely to eat breakfast promptly, though, at least some of it, anyway, so I wasn’t surprised to see him at it this morning.

I did notice that it took him longer than usual, though. He also seemed to be scattering his food around more than is his habit, too. He does like to pick the food up out of the bowl and put it on the floor next to the bowl, sometimes going back to the bowl to eat some before he returns to the food on the floor, but he usually does eat almost all the food on the floor. This morning he was leaving a good bit around. I left the kitchen to go to the bedroom, and when I came back a few minutes later, it was as Sunny was leaving the kitchen. I glanced at his bowl and saw, first, that there was still a fair bit of food around it and, second, that there was still a fair bit of food in it. Sunny often leaves some food; I think because he gets fed so often, he’s a lot less worried about eating food whether he is hungry or not, and so only eats when he is actually hungry and as much as he’s actually hungry for. Still, there seemed to be more than he usually left, especially when he felt the need to eat right away. So I took a closer look.

All the food scattered around the bowl was his old dog food brand. All the food still in the bowl was his old dog food brand. The little woof had decided he liked the new food better and was registering his vote in favor of it by eating, as much as woofily possible, only the new food. After waiting until after dinner to add more Wellness, I believed I confirmed this theory: when I picked up the Wellness bag, which, remember, he had seen was the source of the new food, he started forward eagerly, wagging his tail. “Yes, Mommy, more of that!”

He did finally eat the old dog food too, but only after making a big play for yet more Wellness. “Oh, I am the cutest woofus of all the woofi, and you do want to give me the yummy new food instead of that old one! You want to give me lots more because it would make me so very happy!” I do have to do the transition thing, however, so he didn’t get any more than that little extra I added to the once-rejected old food.

Being hungry from his day-long campaign for Wellness and an extra long walk in celebration of good weather, he finally gave up and ate even the old dog food, but with an air of condension. “Well, I suppose I must, but you’re a mean mommy to deny me the good stuff!”

While reading up on hypoglycemia, I stumbled onto stuff about leaky bowel syndrome. Granted, the reality of the disease is questioned by many, but so is fibromyalgia, and I know people with that. I haven’t thought mainstream Western medicine knew it all since I was in my teens. The things that stick out for me in what I’ve read are that LGS has as symptoms depression, anxiety, hypoglycemia, food allergies, hives, gas, lower abdominal pain, menstrual difficulties . . . all things I’ve had most of my life. (I always tested as borderline for hypoglycemia, and no one bothered to tell me that meant I should avoid sugar!) The lower abdominal pain seems to alter with my menstrual cycle, not with when I eat, but when I had an ultrasound for it and complained to the technician that she was going nowhere near the pain, which was “over here!” she said that that was my gut and she couldn’t ultrasound that.

There are those who think that LGS is a factor in causing autism, too. I spent my first few years chronically sick; I don’t know the details beyond rashes, difficulties in getting me to eat, and constant head colds and throat infections that were finally brought to an end by a tonsillectomy so belated that some of my throat muscles had to be cut away to get rid of the tonsils. (They’d grown down instead of up, as most tonsils do, so the doctors kept saying my tonsils weren’t bad enough to be removed.) That is one factor in the against column: if it is LGS, that means I’ve had it most of my life, but I never had noticeable bowel problems beyond gas and very occasional abdominal pain? No inflammation? That makes it seem unlikely, but the rest of the picture fits fairly well.

Unfortunately the major treatment is a yeast-free diet, which means eliminating things that “support” molds or yeasts as well. That eliminates vinegar (I use rice vinegar), tamari, miso, mushrooms, “canned or prepared tomatoes,” all concentrated sugars, artificial sweeteners, and peanuts (I bought three jars of sugarless peanut butter yesterday, of course). Except for the concentrated sugars, all things I had intended to eat to reduce the hypoglycemia. Tofu is neither on the yes or the no list; my guess is that the preparer of the list is not a vegetarian, and tofu simply didn’t occur to her. Being a cultured product, my guess is no. The diet’s supposed to be lots of fresh veggies and meat, which besides meat issues means lots of shopping trips and a lot of cooking, which I do not have time and energy for. The yeast-free diet would be a temporary thing (at least four months)—I could phase in some of the other things later—but I honestly don’t think I can stick to it. I have my doubts about getting simple sugars out of my diet. As for the aerobic exercise four to five times a week, they can forget that. I do not “need to get out into the fresh air and sunshine”!

I can’t even decide whether I should bring it up to my doctor or if he’ll think I’m being a hypochondriac. Granted, he does work at an integrated medicine center, as well as his regular practice, but my experience with doctors is that they either think I’m avoiding them or that I’m a hypochondriac—usually the same doctor thinks both, which is something I’ve never been able to understand. Hassle me and hassle me and hassle me to get in there so he (or an NP filling in) can tell me I’m a hypochondriac!

I’m torn between being too scared to eat because it sounds like everything but the brown rice is on the no-list and having some chocolate “ice cream” and forgetting about it. I’ll probably end up watching more Lois & Clark and eating the “ice cream,” just to try to make it go away. I can’t bear the thought of my diet getting even more difficult. Like I said, I have my doubts about eliminating the sugars because they’ll take away the last bit of joy I have in eating. I can’t imagine trying to just eat plain veggies and meat, even if I can get past the meatness of it. (Last year, because of an emergency that took food preparation out of my hands, I started eating chicken again for a couple months, and it was very hard to get off of it, so I imagine I can get past the meatness of it, although I’ll still feel guilty. But I’d rather feel guilty about eating sugar when I shouldn’t than about killing someone!)

I should go shopping tonight, tomorrow at the latest, and buy some things that will support a low-sugar diet, but I don’t know about this yeast thing now. I was going to buy some Splenda and some rice vinegar.

I wish I could just go back to the days when the only worry about what I ate was whether it made me put on weight or not. (I’d say I could hear my evil mother laughing in the background except she never laughed.)

OK, I might have my favorite food (see Meet the Odd Couple) on occasion, but if I could give up on it as a regular part of living, I would.

Food is an incredible, huge, awful issue. In a way, it feels like the curse of my hated mother. She once told me that I was short-waisted and so would have to watch what I ate my entire life, and I decided that I wouldn’t if I didn’t care what I looked like. Not that I’ve never cared—it’s probably impossible to be an American female without at least having periods of one’s life in which weight is a concern—but for the most part, I have tried, with quite a bit of success, to view weight as irrelevant to my value as a person.

Like sneaky Erinyes, however, other reasons have crept up to force me to watch what I eat. When I was in my mid twenties, severe rashes forced me into the doctor, eventually revealing that I was allergic to dairy (all dairy—goat, sheep, you name the animal) and wheat. Since then I have collected food allergies as if they were fun things to have. The current list includes sesame (and therefore tahini and hummus), apples, carrots, turmeric, and doubtless I’m forgetting something now that still brings me up short when I see it on a food label. While we’re on the topic, milk allergy is not lactose intolerance; pills won’t help it and “non-dairy” foods aren’t tolerable. I had to explain that to a hospital’s nutrition staff when they came to scold me for never drinking the Ensure that they forcibly included with my meals; after all, their other milk-allergic patients obediently drank it. I told them to read what the label said after “ALLERGENS.” They stopped sending the Ensure.

Before you think this is trivial, I challenge you to go through your own kitchen and try eliminating all the explicit items on my list. Keep in mind that they lurk under other names: “casein” (the protein in milk), “caseinate” (a derivative of casein), gluten (vital or not, it’s wheat), modified food starch (unless it says specifically which one it is, it could be wheat or corn, so allergy sufferers of either have to eliminate it), apple juice (in all multijuice mixes); apple cider vinegar (in salad dressings and salsas, damn it!), “vegetable stock” (carrots—it always has carrots). Things that seem unlikely to have any of them have them: Thai Ginger instant soup has milk, for example. No label can go unread, and it’s a good idea to reread them occasionally in case the manufacturer changes the recipe (like the apple cider vinegar recently added to my brand of salsa). Still think it’s trivial?

Then came the gallbladder problems. I was trying to be Super-Mom to Sunny, but keeping up with his WALKIES!!! schedule had me eating loads of fat just so I wasn’t hungry every five minutes. My gallbladder eventually couldn’t take it and let me know, very painfully. No, so far I’ve still got my gallbladder (knock on wood!), but if I stop watching my fat intake, it reminds me it doesn’t like that.

And now it looks like I’m hypoglycemic. I haven’t gone to the doctor to get tested—I’ve been tested many times through my life because I’ve got all the symptoms and always tested OK—but I’m pretty sure I’m there. I have a terrible time hauling myself out of bed in the morning. I’m depressed and irritable. I get sugar rushes and crashes. This to take away my last food pleasure in life, chocolate, and to force me back into eating meat.

That’s the one voluntary restriction on my diet: I’m a vegetarian. OK, I do get sashimi with my sushi (sushi is just the rice; sashimi is the raw fish) and I do order shrimp when I get Chinese food, but those happen each about twice a year. My only real source of protein is tofu because nuts are fat-loaded (my gallbladder complains) and meat substitutes like seitan and all those Tofurkey and phony meat items contain wheat gluten (my skin and sinuses complain). Eating only the tofu is dangerous because the surest way to develop an allergy to something is to make it a major part of your diet. To be honest, I should’ve moved back into meat even before the hypoglycemia, but with that requiring me to push my protein intake, I don’t have much choice.

So today I hate returned to fish. I bought Salmon Burgers and canned tuna (dolphin safe, at my coop). I haven’t eaten it yet; I had Not Dogs for dinner tonight. But it’s there and I’m gonna have to start eating it while giving up the chocolate milk and the “ice cream”. I’m gonna try keeping the “ice cream” in the diet, but in small portions, only on weekends, never both days of the weekend, that kind of thing, and see if it works. I imagine I’ll have to actually give it up, though.

I’m hoping to keep my vegan cocoa in my diet. I make the mix myself from vegan baker’s cocoa, soy milk powder, and Stevia, although that last is super expensive in an already expensive mix (soy milk powder went up about 25% in price this past winter, to $12 per canister, and the baker’s cocoa is not cheap). At least Stevia’s supposed to be a zero on the glycemic scale, though, unlike the flavoring syrups that I have been adding to it, although I might be able to get sugar-free versions of those. I was reading about hypoglycemia and sweetners on the internet tonight, and although I’ve been told that natural sweetners like agave and brown rice syrup metabolize differently, I haven’t seen that corroborated. One article spoke disapprovingly of artificial sweetners, saying it encourages people to think they can have something sweet and have sweet cravings, but I think I’m going to go the Splenda route, at least to start off. There’s so little variety in my diet already, and certainly nothing on the YUM! list but the chocolate things.

Oh, and the dog? (It’s his blog, remember?) From his point of view, if it’s Mommy-food, it’s yummy and he wants some. All Mommy-food is not created equal, though: he goes nuts for the meat occasionally provided by Meatman. Sunny will unquestionably approve of the addition of fish to Mommy’s diet, provided he gets the occasional nibble of it.