This is Ms. Bay. This is her donut. Not the lard deep-fried kind, doused in sugar, but her favorite toy. She was labeled a chronic ingester as a pup, so she fit right into our family. She ate Christmas ornaments, a whole frisbee, the center island in the kitchen (not the whole thing just the corners), legos, whatever she could find when she was a pup. And she looked so innocent. Just look. (Sorry it’s crooked, scanned in and very amateur, but it’s the holidays.)

So we needed to find things that worked for this little princess. I started building her toy arsenal per the trainer. Only bought toys with 5 teeth marks. Then, we found the donut.

Ms. Bay LOVES her donut. When I exercise in my living room, she gets her donut and dances around, too. This morning I had this thought while watching her: What if, in using the rethinking our words blog I just wrote, we made our cookies a “run around the track?” You know, like the way Ms. Bay has come to associate her donut with activity. The technical concept is  “reframing.” What if we take those words which used to mean “fat”, and re-associate them with things that help us achieve our ideal weight and health goals? I think it’d be a fun experiment. I mean, Ms. Bay gets so much joy from her donut and has a complete association of play and exercise when anybody says the word.

While I muse, I’m going to take Ms. Bay for a walk–I mean, a cookie.