LIKE A DOG WITH KIBBLE

Dogs are amazing.  I grew up with a Dalmation, a total sweetheart that my brother and I named “Zelda”, for obvious reasons for anyone that has read this blog and knows how big of a nerd I was growing up…and presently, as this trend continued with dogs named Kirby, Yoshi, Toadette and a soon to be welcomed into the family Luigi.  We, as a species, do not deserve dogs, and, in turn, we can learn a LOT from them.  They teach us unconditional love, they have a zest for life that is compelling, they know how to play hard, and they tend to be incredible judges of character, because, quite frankly, if my dog doesn’t like you, then I don’t like you either.  But one of the most admirable qualities of a domesticated dog is displayed when you feed them.  Now, before I tell this story, I’m going to warn my readers that I DO feed my dogs kibble, so I apologize if that triggers those of you that ONLY feed your dogs a raw diet of berries and figs that were massaged by virgins from Nepal before blessed by at least 4 different Popes: that’s just not my situation.  But, anyway, if you’ve never owned or fed a dog before, there’s something really incredible to observe whenever you feed them their bowl of kibble: the dog is ALWAYS excited for it.  We feed our dogs twice a day, and as soon as you say “breakfast” or “dinner”, their ears perk up, their eyes get big, they start drooling, and as you walk over to the foodbowl, they are ALL up in your business.  Our female pug, Yoshi, used to do a little prance on her way to the foodbowl, and it got to the point that, if it was even REMOTELY close to food time and you were walking ANYWHERE in the house, that dog would follow you the entire time,  prancing, as if to give you a subtle reminder that it may, in fact, be time to feed her.  Yet, there’s never anything NEW on the menu: it’s ALWAYS the same kibble.  It’s the same kibble it was yesterday, and it’s the same kibble it will be tomorrow…and the dog is SO excited about it.  It cannot WAIT to get that kibble: this is THE highlight of the day, as far as the dog is concerned.  Why can’t WE be like that?  Why can’t WE be like a dog with kibble?

I suppose some of us ARE like that...

Believe me: I get it.  I grew up with the Animal Pak ads of the early 2000s, where Frank McGrath was always slumped over in a hoodie and a pair of workboots in a morose black and white photo, looking like a broken shell of a man while a loaded barbell mocked him inside the confines of what appeared to be the set of a snuff film with one dimly lit dangling light blub adjacent to a water heater and a radiator.  It was a striking visual that told us to “embrace the grind”…but perhaps we focused too much on that “grind” part and not enough on the “embrace”.  We thought we were so cool to SUFFER through the day to day grind of training, but it appears that we completely missed out on what it means to truly embrace something.  Instead of enduring the grind, instead of suffering through the grind, instead of surviving the grind, we should very well WELCOME the grind.  We should be EXCITED for the grind.  Like a dog with kibble, every time that grind shows up, we should be able to think to ourselves “oh boy: I get this AGAIN?!  How many times in a row am I going to be so lucky?!”  It should not be “I HAVE to train”: it should be “I GET to train”.

Just in case you thought I was being hyperbolic describing the ads

 

And like a dog with kibble, the analogy very easily transcends to our own experiences at the dinner table.  WHY are you sitting there, choking down dry chicken breasts and rice with broccoli with no flavor whatsoever?  Because it makes you hardcore to do so?  Because suffering is how we progress?  Here we are flawed in many ways.  For the one: we display a SIGNIFICANT degree of ungratefulness: to be afforded the LUXURY of such an abundance of nutrition that we feel as though we SUFFER when we eat a highly nutritious meal in the pursuit of vanity while others must go without, subsiding on scraps or, simply nothing.  We overstate our own significance here.  And if we could rightly orient our perspective, we could learn to approach this meal like a dog with kibble: so amazed that, somehow, we get to eat AGAIN at a time of our choosing with the food that nourishes us.  But thirdly, we display that we’ve set ourselves up for failure by intentionally pursuing a nutritional strategy that is, flat out, unsustainable.  Any approach that requires willpower to succeed is an approach that is simply not indefinitely sustainable, for willpower itself is a finite resource.  And perhaps this IS a phasic approach to nutrition you are employing, perhaps the intent IS to only do this for a little bit to achieve a goal, but then, as Dan John points out, we must ask the question of “now what?”  What is our plan to move OUT of this unsustainable approach into something that we CAN approach like a dog with kibble?  An approach wherein, each and every time we are presented with the opportunity to partake, we don’t approach with resentment or ennui but, instead, a legitimate excitement.

And yes, I realize that for years I’ve written about how suffering is a necessary part of the process of growing, but understand what is being said here.  This is not to say that, as we are enduring the suffering of the training we must be jubilant, excited and happy. This is a call for that excitement when the time comes to engage IN the suffering.  That we are excited that we GET to train, that we GET to eat, that we are, once again, afforded an opportunity to further our physical transformation and become closer to the ideal image we have of ourselves.  That if we are approaching these situations with dread, with reservations, with resentment, we are simply on an unsustainable path that will have consequences with the rebound inevitably strikes once the willpower is exhausted.  That if we have handcuffed ourselves to a nutritional dogma because it’s “the right one”, if it results in us dreading the experience of eating and never feeling “right”, we will inevitably crash hard as our body claws and scratches it’s way back to what it KNOWS is right for itself.  That if we marry ourselves to a training protocol that just never gels with our psychology, irrespective of how backed it is by science, it will never allow us to realize our true potential, as we will simply never give to it the amount of diligence it is due.  That, if we do not approach our training and nutrition in the same manner a dog approaches it’s kibble every single day, we will be unable to exist in the same naturally blissful state as our canine companions, who never worry about achieving the right macros or getting the correct amount of exercise per day and, instead, are simply out there living a far more authentic life than the majority of us.

See: it's ok to smile

 

We don’t deserve dogs, and they love us so much that they’ll teach us these lessons in spite of that.