WEIGH IT UP!
The old adage ‘You are what you eat’ applies to our dogs just as much as it does to ourselves.
When thinking about weight management for dogs, understanding the food effect is fundamental. Food provides all the nutrients that are needed to support and sustain life, as well as energy in the form of calories. We often forget about the importance of food as fuel for the body, but it is important to make sure we provide our dogs with energy to support health and vitality. Sometimes we must provide extra dietary energy in the form of calories to support sporting or other performance demands on the body.
However, energy must be balanced in terms of the amount consumed in food and the amount burned off through physical activity. When the number of calories ingested exceeds the number that are expended, then they are very efficiently stored in the body as fat. Equally, when more calories are used for physical activity than are ingested in food, body fat (and other tissues in extreme cases) will be converted into energy and burned off. This balancing system is typically how weight management is viewed but shows that it is not simply about food alone.
Indeed, in the same way that lifestyle, diet, exercise, health, genetics, sleep, stress, and our basic biology can affect our waistlines, all these factors affect our dogs’ body weight too. So, how can you help your dog to keep slim, trim, healthy, and happy, through diet and exercise?
DIET DECISIONS
What your dog is fed is often the first thing to consider when you are looking at managing his body weight. It might be that feeding a little less each day is sufficient to trim his waistline, but sometimes a more significant reduction in the amount fed is needed, both in meals and from treats. This can be a successful early intervention strategy and works well if you strictly monitor and manage it. Weighing each meal makes sure you feed no more than needed. Counting out treats for the day and only using those counted means you don’t over-indulge your dog. If you feed dry dog food, you could even use part of his daily meal ration as treats or rewards for great behaviour and spread his food out through the day.
FOLLOW THE FEEDING GUIDES
If you are feeding a commercial food, compare the amount you are feeding with the recommended feeding amount on the packaging. If you are feeding significantly less than suggested, you might want to look at an alternative diet. This is because balanced diets are formulated to be fed at the suggested intake levels to ensure all the required nutrients are provided at the correct levels.
By feeding less, you might manage weight, but could also inadvertently cause a deficiency in other essential nutrients such as vitamins and minerals. In these situations, looking a little more closely at the nutritional information on your dog’s food can be important for diet decisions. There are diets available that are especially formulated for weight management and it might be worth considering these where a significant weight loss is required as they often contain specific nutrients such as carnitine which may support weight management.
COUNTING CALORIES
The calorie is a unit of energy that is used in nutrition to indicate how much energy is provided by a given amount of food.
Fat supplies more than twice the calories per gram than either protein or carbohydrate. For this simple reason, diets that are formulated to support weight loss or weight management typically have moderate to low levels of fat (sometimes 10 per cent fat or less). This is a really simple way to reduce the calories consumed without having to reduce the volume of food fed and can be a good way of identifying a food that can be part of your dog’s weight management strategy.
It is also good practice to look carefully at the information about the food you are feeding, or even ask the manufacturer or supplier about the energy content of the food. This is generally described as the metabolisable energy (ME) and is typically described in kilocalories per 100g of food (kcal/100g). High energy and performance diets will often have an ME content nearing (or exceeding) 400 kcal/100g of food. Diets for weight management will often be less than 350 kcal/100g of food; again, a useful way to start to identify a suitable diet for your dog’s needs.
“...don’t forget about exercise...”