Stuff Your Face

Saturday May 31 2014

It's SO hard being on a diet. The Dude, who has, shall we say, a little trouble with the flab, is on a restricted diet. He's got a fatty neck crest (which does make for great hugs), plenty of padding on his sides, and fatty dimples around his tail dock. Steph said it looks like her salad bowl. Dudley has no complex about his plus size, but he must lose more weight.

He gets restricted hay soaked in water to remove the sugars (he's insulin resistant), and he doesn't get to eat grass, much to his chagrin.

He works out almost every day - and slowly he's losing the pounds and getting fitter. My goal is to have him not-fat and sound and fit enough to do a 50-mile ride by the end of the season (and if it's sooner - great!).

His reward for working out hard on the trail is stopping for a few bites of grass on the way home. We stop, because he can't eat and chew at the same time - he about falls over.

He knows how to stuff his face.

Gotta love The Dude!

The Dude Meets Jenny Craig

Saturday February 22 2014

The Dude is starting a serious diet and workout plan.

For a while it wasn't possible to regulate his intake and exercise, so, naturally, he blossomed. In every direction.

These are NOT rippling muscles

 Rolls, I tell you.

 

LOTS of love handles

Tail fat deposits!

"Dude!" I say to him, every day. "You're FAT!"

Every day, he blinks at me, and sighs, I know, but I'm still handsome.

Gotta give him that.

Now his diet is restricted. Now he puts his time in the Fat Pen. Now he's started working out.

Today he took me out on a ride, maybe 4 1/2 miles, the furtherest he's been in, oh, several years, and he didn't have a heart attack doing it. He did get sweaty and foamy, but he had a good workout.

You can't see the sweat running down his face in this picture, but it's there!

I don't think he'll ever be as slim as a racehorse, say, like Stormy was in his racing days, but maybe The Dude will at least trim off some blubber on his Owyhee Jenny Craig plan.

Where's the Beef?

Friday October 23 2009

Where's The Beef?

Who is this slim, shapely, handsome beast? Could this be Dudley, the perennial overweight buffalo-fat lard-butt pudgeball?

No matter what kind of diet he's been on, he can just gaze longingly at the big hay bales behind the fence and it goes straight to his hips. And everywhere else.

So in addition to putting him on a strict diet (AGAIN), we started him on this D-Carb Balance formula. It's for Insulin Resistant horses (we suspect Dudley is), laminitic horses (Dudley's had several episodes), and obese horses (DUDLEY).

The D-Carb is supposed to help the body use the feed as energy instead of storing it as fat. We started him on it on mid-September; he was in a large pen with Finneas - who drove him all day (somehow Finneas thinks it keeps the flies off his face to drive Dudley around all day long). They probably walked at least 10 miles a day, so Dudley was getting plenty of exercise, along with his diet of hay only, and the D-Carb.

During the 5-day Canyonlands Ride, Dudley was stuck in a small pen for about 8 days, and I thought he was getting a little slimmer, though that had to be my imagination, because he was getting zero exercise.

After the ride, he was turned back out to plenty of roaming around. I was gone for two weeks, and I come back to see: hipbones! Dudley has hipbones! And a neck that is not so cresty. The fat dimples over his butt are almost a memory. He's a horse that looks like... well, a horse!
I want to say he's not even so obsessed over food, because there are times I see him up the canyon just standing there and hanging out, and not looking for food, scheming for food, escaping for food, or scheming to escape for food.

I'm not saying this D-Carb stuff is a miracle, and I'm the world's greatest devil's advocate and skeptic, but, Dudley the Beefalo, for whatever reasons, is becoming Dudley Slim Jim.