Izzercise

Izzy our puggle loves food, and by love I mean obsessed with it.

My day starts every morning with her pawing at me, lately around 3:30am (this needs to stop) wanting to eat breakfast. If I say no, the pawing grows progressively worse until she is literally digging into the covers pulling them off of me and I give in.

 By the way, I find it strange that she never does this to John when I am not here, or maybe he has amazing sleep power to sleep through it...

We go downstairs, I feed her, she goes potty and sprints back up to bed. She falls right back to sleep and I am left thinking about random thoughts and soon enough just when I start drifting into dreamland... the alarm goes off. Grrr...
The puggle princess sleeps until about noon, then she decides to get out of bed and begs at my feet while I'm working until I give her a treat, then it's back to bed for another nap until around 3:00pm. At this point, she's waiting by her food bowl pawing at the container where we keep her food wanting dinner. She's actually figured out how to open the container, and there have been a few times we've caught her eating directly out of it. If we did not catch her, I'm sure she would eat the entire thing.

If I don't feed her then, she will continue to beg at my feet until I do. Despite how hard I try to ignore her, I cannot get anything done with her pawing at my leg or the door if I decide to lock her out of the office. Fine, you want dinner at 3:30? you have it.
While we're cooking dinner, she's at our feet quickly snatching up whatever may fall on the floor. I find myself actually complaining when she is not there and I have to actually lean over and pick it up!
While we are eating, she is waiting right by the table for any chance that she may get a taste of what we're having.
I have only found a couple foods that have dropped on the floor that she ignores... celery and fresh mushrooms. Cooked mushrooms are fine though.

I know that we've created this food monster and continue to support her bad habits because it seems easier than trying to break them.
So given her love of food and the fact that she's got the stocky pug genes, she needs exercise. As much as I would love to be able to get her outside and on a walk everyday, it's not always possible with our schedules and the weather,  so we've developed a work out routine called Izzercise.

We started by cutting her dog food dinner portion in half. There is food involved with her work out, so we don't want this to counteract the point of exercising in the first place.


small portion of carrots

We take a variety of fruits and vegetables - typically carrots, apples and depending what we have in the fridge (cucumbers, peas, green pepper) chop into small pieces. I would say maybe 1/4 cup. The stairs in our townhouse are split so we are able to stand at the top of the stairs and drop directly down, but I'm you could do it from the top of a regular stair case and throw down to the bottom. I stand at the top of the steps with her, and then I tell her to "Go!" as we drop the piece of food. She sprints down to the bottom of the steps and back up again before I tell her to "Go" and drop another piece of food. 

About half way through she is really panting and stops to grab some water before we continue on.
When there are about 10 pieces of food left left we then move into puppy push ups. This is a combination of a sit, lay down, sit, and then rewarded with a piece of food.

She's dropped a couple pounds since we started this routine and she loves doing it because food is involved!

By the time we reach the end she is exhausted and usually doesn't beg for food again, until 3:30 the next morning :)