Portion Size

Dawg in her "I swear I heard potato chips around here somewhere" pose

I find that I eat a lot less these days. Not that I'm complaining - for person who historically could eat most of a medium-sized ham at one sitting, this new dietary restraint is welcome and overdue. It means that we waste a certain amount of food, though the word "waste" may not be entirely accurate, since what I can't eat generally finds its way onto the floor for Dawg to consume. The laws of dog karma say that I should divvy out the excess food evenly between Dawg and Elmo, but Elmo doesn't like most Man-Food and it takes him forever to make up his mind to eat things like dressing or hot dog chunks. Meantime, Dawg has eaten her entire share and is slavering for his, scrabbling and clawing in a desperate attempt to get to his spuds before he makes up his mind.

So the usual process is that I pass the plate to Dawg and say "Don't tell Elmo about this." Within seconds the food is gone, and other than the suspicious hint of brown gravy and Italian dressing on Dawg's breath, nobody is the wiser.


I suppose there's some actual scientific theory to explain this reduction in appetite, just like the theory that explains why Hodgkin's makes you itch like a naked man in a room full of mosquitoes. But I think it's merely that feeling bad as a consequence of overeating is now piled on top of feeling bad as a consequence of cancer, and my body is slowly learning to avoid things that make it feel bad. You'd think that by this age I'd have already figured that one out, but NO.


But we have to get this portion size thing figured out, because the real loser in all of this is Dawg. She's always had a certain tendency to run on the chunky side, but she's starting to show a certain plushness - good for those times when it's three in the morning and hugging the puzzled Dawg is the only thing left that I can do without waking Jean up, who needs sleep worse than I do, but not so good for Dawg's own health.