Cheese Makes Everything Better

Contrary to the title, this post isn't really about cheese; it is about and reducing stress and relationship building. There is a lot of discussion about "emotional eating" for people, usually with the implication that it is bad. But eating really does decrease stress. We can use this with our dogs (and ourselves), the trick is to do it mindfully in a way that really does help with the stress. For myself, that means choosing something I like eating and eating it slowly. My dogs aren't very good at eating slowly. But I can feed them slowly in a calm manner that doesn't work them up. When I notice that they are having a bad day or have had a lot of stress recently, I'll sit down with them in a relaxed manner and just feed them their meal a bit at a time. They don't need to "work for it", they just get it because they need to eat in a low stress way.

What does all this have to do with the title? For Max, his favorite stress eating food is cheese. His life motto seems to be "Cheese Makes Everything Better."