Pedometer or petometer?

I opened a new bag of dog food the other day and inside I found a prize. But instead of the usual useless toy or coupon for more dog food, it was a pedometer. As you can see from the picture here, it is from Purina® and is part of their Project: Pet Slim Down™ program. I get more out of our morning walks than my dog Charlie does, though, so I think of our morning walks as something good for me. Charlie does enjoy inspecting the neighborhood and making sure everyone is doing things right. He especially enjoys garbage day and smelling what everyone had for dinner during the past week.

I used it on a few of our morning walks and found we went about 2400 steps. Well, I took 2400 steps. Charlie took at least twice as many (having twice as many feet as I do) and he has shorter legs so he has to take more steps to keep up. Maybe I'll attach it to him and see what it reads. I took it to work one day to see how far I walk around the office. Also, I wanted to make sure it was working so I was looking down at the display (in the picture to the left) to see if it was incrementing for each step. I had to hold my belly in to be able to read the display. It took so much effort and concentration that I almost ran into someone.

As you can see in the last picture on the right, if I don't hold my belly back, I can't read the display. Obviously, I'm in very good shape. I do try to walk a lot but this winter has made that difficult and it's been very busy at work so I've been missing a lot of my walks at lunch. But now I realize the real purpose of this pedometer. Its purpose is to encourage me to walk often enough and long enough to get my belly size down so I can read the display of the pedometer without needing to push my belly back out of the way.