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The diet plan that came with a shelter dog
Eric weighed 340 pounds when his doctor told him to buy a funeral plot. He would need one, the doctor said, within five years. more
He had Type 2 diabetes and very high cholesterol, and his blood pressure was "through the roof." He felt so uncomfortable around other people that he pulled away from them. "I just stopped living," he says.
The low point came on a business trip. He could barely squeeze into his airplane seat, and the flight was held up because there was no seat belt extension that would fit him. The man beside him looked at him in disgust and said, "I'm going to miss my connection because you're too fat."
Eric decided he was either going to die or do something. He found a nutritionist in the phone book, and one of the first things she asked him to do sounded odd: adopt a shelter dog. A dog would get him outside and around people again.
At the shelter he asked for a heavy, middle-aged dog, so the two of them would have something in common. When he walked in, he and the dog gave each other a look that said "really?" He took Peety home that night.
Over time the two became inseparable. They walked at least half an hour every day, and within a year, by changing what he ate and walking with Peety, Eric lost more than 140 pounds. Peety lost about 25. "We did it together," Eric says.
SaveEric got off all his medicines, and he no longer has Type 2 diabetes. Peety had a hard past of his own. He had been left alone in a backyard where nobody played with him, with arthritis and itchy skin, and with Eric he became a proud dog.
Peety looked at Eric as though he were the greatest person on the planet. "I decided that I wanted to be the person who he thought I was," Eric says. One of his dreams was to run a full marathon, and he went out and did it.
SavePeety was getting old. A large cancer turned up on his spleen, and nothing could be done. Eric lay beside him on the floor at the end and held him.
About six months later, after a race, Eric had a sudden urge to drive to the shelter. A dog named Jake had been put in the adoption pen four minutes earlier, and now the two run together and are training for their first half marathon. Eric still asks himself who rescued whom.
