As we near the end of the year and prepare to welcome 2024, there is an eerie feeling of déjà vu at the Peeper house.
It appears we are going to start the New Year the same way we did almost a year ago as we welcomed 2023.
It’s almost like a scene out of the 1993 comedy “Groundhog Day” in which Bill Murray plays the role of TV weatherman Phil Connors, who is trapped in a time loop and has to relive Feb. 2 in Punxsutawney, Penn., over and over and over again.
The culprit of our déjà vu, however, is not a groundhog. Instead, it’s a soon-to-be 4-year old golden retriever who is on the naughty list this holiday season. And his owners are on that same list, too.
A recent appointment with our vet resulted in Jen and I hearing those four dreaded words that he had shared with us almost a year ago.
“Your dog is overweight,” he told us — again.
Santiago has always been a big dog. He’s longer, taller and more muscular than most golden retrievers. He’s so strong that if I’m lying on the floor he can put his nose under me and roll me over.
He was the biggest in the litter and probably the bully who pushed his siblings out of the way at meal time so that he could be the first to eat while also enjoying more than his fair share of food.
A few of his littermates are also big but he passed them at 95 pounds when they stopped growing. Santiago, however, passed the 100-pound mark on the scale … and then the 110-pound mark.
Our vet did some blood work last year and ruled out hypothyroidism, a condition that causes dogs to gain weight yet is treatable with medicine. Thankfully, he didn’t have the disease.
We adjusted his diet and saw his weight start to fall as the year went on. By the end of summer, however, we backed off a bit on how strict we had been.
Big mistake.
Santiago packed back on the pounds as quickly as I do each year around the holidays.
Our vet tested him again to rule out hypothyroidism, and once again he doesn’t have the condition.
Instead, he simply likes to eat and sleep — two activities that mix about as well as oil and water when you’re trying to drop some weight.
Now, we’re back to healthy treats of baby carrots, green beans and a half rice caked mixed in with his cup of food in the morning and in the evening. We already walk 2 miles a day and are working on increasing that distance to 3 miles a day.
The peanut butter Kong that Santiago used to receive while we ate dinner at night has been replaced with a few carrots and green beans. Instead of receiving a little peanut butter every night, he now gets a much smaller Kong once a week that we freeze before giving to him.
It has been a month since we switched up his routine, and we are already seeing progress.
I took him by the vet’s office last week to see if he had lost any weight in the past four weeks. He was down 2.3 pounds — welcome news for us.
Our plan is to do monthly weight checks to make sure we’re making progress toward our goal of a golden retriever who doesn’t weigh more than 100 pounds.
We reached out to our breeder to see if Santiago’s parents or siblings were as big. Turns out his mom really likes to eat, as the breeder has to monitor her food and feed her other golden retrievers in another room so that she doesn’t try to eat it.
I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Our New Year’s Resolution for Santiago in 2024 will be to drop enough weight by the end of summer and keep it off so that the digital display on the scale never shows three digits again.
It’s certainly déjà vu all over again.
jdpeeper2@hotmail.com
