Excerpt: 'Fitness Unleashed'

April 28, 2006 — -- Take a good look at yourself and your dog.

Are you both overweight? If so, then Dr. Marty Becker's book, "Fitness Unleashed," was written with you in mind.

His book tells how pet owners can lose weight along with their dogs, teaching them how to gain healthier habits together.

Below is an excerpt from the book.

People and dogs have always leaned on one another. In return for food, shelter, and affection, dogs are helpmates in everything from retrieving downed ducks to guarding the house and guiding the blind. For most of us, though, the services we receive from our dogs are much less utilitarian but equally endearing: they adore us when we're up, when we're down, and even when we're having a bad hair day, wearing our rattiest old bathrobe, and feeling cranky. They sit on (not just at) our feet, wait for us at the door, and go to great lengths to wriggle into a spot right beside us whenever they can get away with it. They make us laugh by being silly and full of puppy charm, regardless of their age; and they have an uncanny ability to read our emotions and sync themselves up, ready and willing to be cheerful or mad just because we are.

Somehow all the small acts of affection, concern, loyalty, and furriness add up to more than just gestures and companionship. Research has proven that having a dog is good for your health in a number of measurable and not-so-measurable ways. Studies show that people who own pets tend to have lower blood pressure and lower cholesterol levels than those who don't. Pet owners have better odds of surviving heart attacks than patients without pets. As a group, pet owners find their chronic pain diminished, make fewer trips to the doctor, are less medicated, less lonely, less depressed, and less stressed than their petless counterparts and those are just the subtle, unintended benefits of time spent with our four-legged and furry companions. For those who deliberately harness the health benefits of pets, there are even greater rewards to be reaped. Dogs have been trained to provide services that assist people with a vast range of needs -- including guiding the blind, serving as hearing companions for the deaf, helping the physically challenged to overcome obstacles, and serving to alert their owners of imminent seizures or blood-sugar imbalances. Dogs are used to tremendous effect in therapeutic and educational settings, doing everything from helping kids learn to read in classrooms to providing much-needed inspiration for residents of nursing homes to increase their levels of activity and social interaction.

In these kinds of win/win partnerships, dogs also reap some surprising benefits. You may have read that when you pet your dog, your blood pressure drops and the level of the feel-good hormones such as oxytocin, prolactin, and serotonin in your blood increases. But did you also know that during that interaction, your dog experiences the same benefits-- his blood pressure drops and he receives a biochemical spa treatment, too? Your dog's longevity is directly tied to the care you provide; everything from a roof over his head at night and regular veterinary visits to optimum nutrition and the affection that makes him feel loved and needed contributes to his good health. A dog who's been abandoned has a life expectancy of a year or less. Those who live in loving homes can expect to live to their breed's expectancy -- anywhere from seven years to eighteen or more.

Despite all the good that people and pets do one another, in recent years our healthful relationship has taken an unexpected turn. In our increasingly sedentary, stressed-out, and overfed culture, people are consuming more calories, exercising less, and collectively getting more overweight by the minute. Without intending to cause any harm, many of us have shared our generous portions and inactive routines with our beloved pets. We share our couches and beds, as well as our ice cream and cookies, with our dogs, and they're very happy to get on board with whatever lifestyle we're offering -- especially one that's heavy on the treats. Centuries of species self-preservation have left most dogs with a strong desire to consume any edible bite they can find -- they've historically survived as scavengers, after all. Many will eat as much, and as often, as you'll let them.

Scaling Up, Side by Side

One big (and growing) result of these changes in lifestyle for pets and people is the effect Dr. Kushner has dubbed scaling up -- weight gain that's a common, if unwelcome, life experience. Scaling up describes how people put on pounds not just through failed willpower or the wrong mix of carbs and protein, but because we live in a society where every aspect of our food consumption and activity levels seems designed to add weight to our frames. Factors like crammed-full schedules, crammed-full plates, desk jobs, slowing metabolisms, and a lack of time to devote to the care and maintenance of our bodies all contribute to it gradually. Scaling up doesn't even necessarily imply poor choices -- it means that just following the basic eating and exercise trends our society offers is enough to make trying to maintain -- or reduce -- your current weight a losing battle.

The concept applies equally well to dogs, who are truly the victims of their environments as they pack on the pounds. Often, it's just our generosity that's making them chubby! Our food-is-love affection adds up to lots of treats, lots of off-the-table snacks, and too much kibble in the bowl from day to day.

Surprisingly, when you look past the basic calories-in/calories-out equation for both people and dogs, the roots of this crisis are very similar for both species. In a nutshell: most of us are not using our bodies the way nature -- and natural selection -- intended. The human body is designed for function and for movement. Up until the twentieth-century inventions of the automobile, the washing machine, riding lawnmowers, power tools, personal computers, and countless other gadgets and gizmos designed to reduce the physical labor in our personal and professional lives, average folks were in near-constant motion.

A recent study that highlighted this point was led by researchers from the University of Tennessee. To try to come up with an assessment of the physical exertion previous generations might have made, the team asked members of an old-order Amish community in Canada to wear pedometers as they went about their daily lives. The chosen community is one that shuns modern conveniences and continues to maintain a self-sufficient farming lifestyle. Though there was no deliberate effort made by the participants to exercise, as they kept up their normal routines, the men logged an average of more than 18,000 steps a day. The women logged an average of more than 14,000. To put those numbers in perspective, the average American is currently walking between 3,000 and 5,000 steps a day, and the goal you'll read about in this book, the one fitness plans and gurus across the country have embraced as an ideal exertion level, is 10,000 steps. Taking close to double that number of steps, the Amish men were getting the same level of workout as a long-distance runner by doing just their daily work. Though their other physical efforts were not measured, it's a pretty safe bet that the people in this community were also doing more lifting, bending, squatting, stretching, and general exercising than your average, say, computer programmer, magazine editor, or retail-store clerk.

Just as we humans are not living up to our physical potential, neither are our dogs. Before selective breeding, rather than finding food in a bowl, they were always walking and running in search of fast food. In more recent history, hundreds of years of selective breeding designed most dogs to be tireless physical workers. Breeds like Labs and goldens and border collies and shelties and huskies and many, many others are genetically programmed to run, not just walk, for hours without getting worn out. Historically, the majority of dog breeds were selectively bred to either hunt or herd alongside their owners. Their functions ranged widely, but in most cases, the intent was to train an effective tool for the family. Everything about their frames, their musculature, and their mental abilities is designed for a life on the go. It contradicts your dog's hardwiring and natural inclinations to sideline all that physicality on the couch, often alone, day in and day out, not far from pantries bursting with food and treats. As both species become more and more out of shape, we experience almost identical health complications of overweight and obesity, including heart disease, diabetes, joint ailments, and an increased risk of cancer. New studies even suggest those extra pounds may put us at higher risk for Alzheimer's disease as well. What's more, we share the experience of getting trapped by our own symptoms --