How feeding my dog a raw diet changed his anxiety to calm and confident
1. I realized what a horrible diet I was feeding him on a "premium" kibble diet only
Kibble is all processed. Mostly carbs. All of it. Image eating processed food, cooked so much that most of the nutrients are actually stripped out. Every day. Even if it's got a "premium" label and a pretty picture of real food on it, honestly it's the equivalent of a junk food diet. Also, it's dry. No hydration whatsoever in kibble.
2. I had started to change my own diet, realizing how crappy I felt when I ate mostly processed foods and didn't hydrate myself.
3. My dog was going through a bout of anxiety that had developed at 5 years old.
4. I started coaching puppies and their people at Pet Power Studio, where feeding whole food to your dog is what it's all about.
5. I started my dog on raw food and when I did that it made me start preparing better food for myself.
6. We walked or ran together every day for 30 days in a row (to start).
Feeding my dog raw food and myself more whole food, getting out the door to do our 20 min walk/run became something we looked forward to. It was no longer a "we have to do this and it's not fun, it's stressful because my dog pulls on the leash all the time.
I was able to slow down and realize I needed to spend the time on his reactivity, which stemmed from deep within as anxiety. It is how the Calming the Chaos Experiment was born.
He started dropping the reactivity as the anxiety level came down. We started having fun without the frustrating battle between him and I and the leash. That was the physical form of hanging onto anxiety.
How does that relate to what I fed him and myself?
I didn't feel like shit from a crappy diet and no hydration and neither did he.
Our guts were better and so were our minds. I'd go so far as to say even our souls were better.
It started with the food. Beginning to heal the gut, which led straight to the mind.
We started understanding healing from the bottom up instead of top down. We got our of our heads and into feeling better. The anxiety dissipated.
7. He's gone from flipping out with separation anxiety to calm and confident in 90 days
In my professional opinion, that was a fast turn around. But, the truth of the matter is I went to work on it and stayed with working through the valleys without wavering from the daily walk/run, raw food diet for him, whole food for me, and he hung out with me in a 10 minute mediation. Sounds simple. It really is, but it takes dedicated commitment to deviate from the over extended rushed daily urban lifestyle we'd been doing together. We'd both been practicing anxiety every day before. Doing something new to the point it becomes a habit does take a commitment. One I'm glad we did.
It's made me a better trainer. You can't really teach something you haven't done.
As I tell many of my clients, you don't always get the dog you want, you get the dog you need. It was true for me too. As a trainer this was put in my life so that I could help others get through anxiety with their dogs and themselves.
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