Go~Fetch~Fitness 2010

We are enjoying a great start to Go~Fetch~Fitness this year! Week one was absolutely packed with information for all of us - two legged and four!! On day one we calculated the daily energy requirement for each dog. This helped our owners determine the exact amount to feed their pets according to their body condition scores and their activity level. We will be increasing our walking time by five minutes each week. For the first week we started out at 20 minutes with about five minutes of warm up stretching before the walk. 
  
On day 2 we special guest who volunteered to join us from Des Moines!  Nicole Schumate is a representative from the Delta Society. She explained that the Delta Society helps prepare pets to become service dogs. These service dogs help in nursing homes, hospitals, physical therapy and in school reading programs. This is a national society and because of this status, when a pet becomes a Delta Society dog, the dog is insured with liability insurance through the Delta Society when they are performing their service activities.  

Tyson Burton was our special guest on day 3 and continued to day 4. Tyson is the General Manager of our local Snap Fitness gym. Tyson has a Masters Degree in exercise science and has worked with athletes at all levels, from high school through the professional level! We are so lucky to have him with us as he and his associate calculated the body composition scores for all of our participants and took us step by step through a discussion of the Five Elements of Fitness: Nutrition, Cardiovascular Fitness, Supplementation, Resistance Training, and Personal Assistance.

On the fifth day of Go Fetch Fitness, we turned the focus from what we can do for the outside of our bodies to what is going on inside. Heidi DuCharme from Allen Hospital's HeartAware program came to the clinic to perform cholesterol and glucose tests for all of the participants who wanted to have a check. Teresa Elverum, an Allen home health nurse came to perform blood pressure checks for everyone as well. Heidi came back to class and explained just what all the numbers meant. She reminded us that the HDL or high density lipoprotein is the good cholesterol that actually helps clean the cholesterol out of our arteries. The bad cholesterol is reflected in the LDL or low density lipoprotein that tends to clog up our arteries. Heidi reminded us that some factors that contribute to high cholesterol are age, gender and genetics. We cannot change these factors, but she also pointed out the factors we can change such as smoking, obesity and poor diet choices. Exercising with your dog qualifies as a cholesterol fighting tool!! It is recommended that we get 45-60 minutes of exercise 5-7 days a week. This can be split into two 25 minute sessions if that works better for your schedule. Increasing your activity level is reported to increase the good cholesterol (HDL).
Heidi had so much information to share, it is impossible to report it all to you today. I encourage you to go to AllenHospital.org to take the HeartAware questionnaire and seek out the information on this website or consult with the nurses in this program.
We have many more tremendous speakers that we will be reporting to you about this Go Fetch Fitness season. To extend the quality time that we have with our families - both two legged and four, is the goal of Go Fetch Fitness. Watch for more upcoming articles as we keep you informed about the journey this courageous group is taking together with their furry friends!!

Day 6 brought us another very experienced speaker in the area of fitness and the physiology of exercise. Paulette Herold is a Registered Nurse Practitioner and has received her MA in Cardiac Rehab and Exercise Physiology from UNI. Paulette has worked in Occupational Health for 14 years. She taught at Allen College, worked in the Vascular Lab and in Cardiac Rehab.
On Friday April 23rd, Paulette discussed the health benefits of walking your dog and of regular exercise in general. Paulette discussed Type 2 Diabetes and how regular exercise helps to stabilize blood sugar. This is true for humans and for dogs. So if you or your dog are overweight and are prone to diabetes or already have diabetes, regular exercise a the same time each day will be very beneficial for both of you. In addition to exercise, keeping a close eye on our sugar intake is important. Watching sugar intake before diabetes is even a concern, helps train our bodies in how to utilize sugar and how to produce insulin. Choosing low sugar, high fiber and roughage type snacks helps keep our insulin production from occurring in great surges and swings and maintains a more even level production. This protects the organ that produces the insulin, the pancreas.

I appreciated Paulette's suggestion for low-sugar snacks, especially for kids. Cut up veggies with low or no fat ranch dressing, peanut butter, mozzarella cheese sticks, wheat thin crackers, yogurt, fruit and Kashi cereals and granola were great suggestions. I have tried these with my own kids with great success!

The common nutrition message that we have been receiving from all of our speakers so far this Go Fetch Fitness season is to avoid processed foods and foods made with bleached or unbleached white flour and foods with hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils. these so called foods, either have no value to us or have a negative impact on our health. They either raise our cholesterol or drive us toward diabetes.
Again, the theme for Go Fetch Fitness is that by exercising with our dogs, we help thwart off the major debilitating diseases that occur in Americans and American dogs such as diabetes, heart disease and even cancer. If we can consistently watch our diet and exercise, we can live longer with a better quality of life with the ones we love.

Welcome to another update of Go Fetch Fitness.  It is hard to believe that we are already half way though our 2010 program!  Our happy pups have really gotten into the swing of coming to Go Fetch to meet up with their new buddies.  Our participants give daily accounts of their dogs getting really excited as they approach the clinic.  Going to the vet was never something to look forward to before, but now we have so much fun walking and sniffing that these dogs can't wait to come back.  It is so fun to watch the transformation from trepidation to anticipation and joy as they scamper in the front door each day. 

Monday was weigh-in day.  Thanks to our good friends at Novartis, each of our participants received a gift certificate.  We had gift cards to Subway, Target, Hy-Vee and Walmart to share with everyone!

Our speakers were sent to us by Merriam Lake, the Healthy Promotion Facilitator for Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare Wellness Services.  Kelsey and Zach are seniors at UNI majoring in exercise science.  It was great to have these young, enthusiastic students with us to share information about a topic they are so passionate about.  Kelsey and Zach spent the week discussing the benefits of strength training and how strength training affects our metabolism. Kelsey and Zach were very prepared with outlines for everyone, exercises to demonstrate some resistance training as well as helping us by leading our pre-walk stretching exercises each day. 

Did you know that according to a 1992 study, middle aged people, especially women, who do not strength train, lost 7 lbs of muscle every ten years, which decreased their metabolism by about 350 calories per day?  Did you know that strength training leads to decreased arthritis pain, increased bone density, decreased blood pressure and improved glucose levels?  Did you know it is impossible to actually turn muscle into fat or fat into muscle?

If you had been here to listen to Kelsey and Zach this week you would have learned all this and much more about strength training and your metabolism.  Plus you would have walked for 90 minutes (30 minutes each Monday, Wednesday and Friday) giving you and your dog 90 out of the recommended 150 minutes of aerobic exercise each week!  Plus you would have had FUN!

Today is May 21, 2010, the last day of Go Fetch Fitness for 2010! We had such a tremendous group this year and each week was just packed with fun and learning. Our last two weeks, week five and six, were so exciting! In week five our special guest was Mary McInnis Meyer who has a yoga studio (Field of Yoga) right across the street from the veterinary hospital in downtown Cedar Falls. Mary is a wonderful speaker and she opened her studio up to all of our dogs and us for the first ever DOGA class in Cedar Falls. (That's dogs plus yoga = Doga!) We had a blast and really came away from this experience with a new understanding and appreciation for the health benefits of yoga. You can see pictures from this class at the Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier Website.

Week Six, our last week together, brought some glorious weather as we really pushed our way through our last three days together. This week was all about the exercise and we did our stretch out exercises and then immediately hit the trail. Our goal was a solid 45 minutes of walking which we accomplished along the beautiful Cedar Valley Trail system excending from Taylor Veterinary Hospital to Big Woods Lake and back!!

Team 2, the K-9 kids, were our big winners this year losing a total sum of 22.7 pounds! Wow! Congratulations! These determined walkers will be receiving a year supply of FREE dog food fromHill's Science Diet Pet Foods! Our individual with the most outstanding weight loss is no stranger to Go FEtch Fitness. J. Schmitz and his dog Blue have been through the Go Fetch Fitness program three times. J. is extremely committed to the program once he starts and this year he lost 14 pounds. For his tremendous effort, he received a 6-month FREE membership to the Family YMCA of Black Hawk County.

We have had so many opportunities to learn about our health in the past six weeks. We are all truly blessed to live in a community where we have access to such wonderful professionals to help us stay on the road to good health! Tyson Burton at Snap Fitness, the nurses at the Allen HeartAware program, Merriam Lake and her staff at Wheaton Fransciscan Healthcare, Mary McInnis Meyer our local yoga instructor at Field of Yoga and the Family YMCA of Black Hwk County are all right here and offer a huge variety of styles of health and fitness opportunities. It is our hope that you will take advantage of one or several of these means of improving or maintaining your health.

By taking care of yourself, you do take care of your whole family, even the furry four legged members! They depend on you to be healthy so that you can continue to make good choices for them as well!

To see more pictures click here.

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