Managing Your Dog's Weight

It may seem cute and innocent that your dog is a little overweight, but it’s really important to understand how weight can have such a huge impact on our dog’s overall health and well-being. 

Setting up an appropriate diet; feeding the right amount of quality food and exercising regularly is the kindest thing you can do for your furbaby.

Obesity In Dogs Is An Epidemic

Being overweight is the single biggest health issue facing dogs, largely because of the increased risk overweight dogs face from a myriad of weight-related issues. Being overweight does put a lot of unnecessary stress on their bodies and particularly their joints.

When you think about their frames and how much weight is suspended between the front and hind legs, you can start to think about how much pressure they can put on their joints by being overweight. Keeping them at a healthy weight is the kindest thing you can do for them and can add years to their lives.

The good news is it's not rocket science! Ultimately, losing weight for a dog is much the same as it is for us…it’s all about managing calories in and calories burned. So it’s important to monitor calorie intake: reduce calories in and gently continue to reduce as they lose weight. If health issues prevent you from increasing activity, you need to focus on reducing feeding to help them out.

Set Up The Right Feeding Plan

You need to be reasonably precise to get calories right… which can be hard when most pet food has such a wide range on the feeding recommendation tables (most are practically useless!). We recommend how much food your dog should need to lose weight, based on their current age, weight and activity. 

Firstly, we need to work out what your dog weighs. If you don’t know you can always pick them up, stand on the scales and subtract your weight. Take out how much of the current food they need. We use the current weight and apply a calorie-restricted calculation for weight management.

Once you have their weight and age, enter it with the ‘Bootcamp needed’ setting. Your personalised feeding plan will look something like this:

Feeding The Right Amount Each Day

Once we have the feeding plan right, we will send you the right amount of food and feeding instructions. You can also see your dog’s feeding plan in your personal dashboard (only accessible once you are set up)

Each box we send out has a feeding label with this info, and a scoop to measure their food. Your feeding label will tell you exactly how much food your dog needs per day in calories, grams and scoops - we include our cardboard measuring scoop to help measure this out. If you are feeding twice a day, you just need to halve the daily intake, per meal. 

Making Adjustments As They Change

Every dog is still a little different so even once we get that feeding recommendation right, we still want to adjust how much we are feeding based on their current body condition – see our chart below for some examples:

Again this can be a little subjective and vary slightly by breed, but ultimately you want to be getting them to a point that you can reasonably easily feel their ribs, through a very slight layer of fat, when you rub her sides standing up. 

If the recommended feeding plan doesn’t start shifting the weight, you just need to dial it back a little further. We recommend applying a 10% rule of thumb – if they still need to lose weight just dial the food back another 10%, try that for a few weeks and adjust again if her condition is/ isn’t getting closer to that ideal condition score.

As the weight starts to come down, you just need to log back in, update the pet profile to the new weight and feed accordingly. If you’re not sure or you don’t start to see a weight reduction within a few weeks, please get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to help set up a feeding plan.

Choosing Quality Ingredients Makes A Big Difference

The other thing that’s important of course is what you are feeding your furbaby– not all dry foods are made equal. Many pet foods vastly over-sell themselves with fancy marketing that hides some nutritionally, rather sub-standard ingredients.

You want to look at the first 6-7 ingredients. All dry food needs a certain amount of carbs to bind a biscuit; these carbs will notably contribute to the calories, which is fine, as long as they are good-quality carbs and still have a lot of meat content. My Furbaby has created a recipe that’s an ideal mix of animal proteins, good-quality carbs and all the nutrients a dog should thrive on.

What Else Can I Do?

The other side of the weight management equation is increasing exercise. Aim to exercise for at least half an hour every day and add playtime throughout the day. Don’t feel guilty if you don’t make the daily walk, but do try to add a little extra playtime if you can’t take a walk.

Other than that, you just need to be diligent on the tidbits and make sure that any threats are deducted from the recommended daily calorie intake (at least roughly).

Manage your dog's weight the easiest way with lots of playtimes and a My Furbaby food plan. Order a taste tester pack to trial and get a discount when you order your first box of fabulous furbaby food 🧡