Do you really weigh your food at each meal

Nope! I work on "Hands full" so I know I'm feeding pretty much the same each day and can easily add or subtract a little if my dogs start to look a little thin or fat. I'm betting none of you weight your husband's food each day, you just feed according to his waist line and exactly the same applies to dogs. I often feed a little on my leftovers, and when I do I just guess how much of their food to reduce by. This morning for example they had some leftover Macaroni Cheese and I skipped half a handful from their normal food.

Regards, John

 

Yes, but I do DIY raw, so I'm also weighing (roughly) so I get the right offal, bone, meat, combination.

I increase/decrease their total amount depending on the look of their waistline still though.

 

I weigh colas food, it's easy enough and only takes a few seconds really. I just put her bowl on the scales

 

Bowl on digital scales and food poured in to the correct weight each meal nowadays. I measured once and then used a mug to give that amount before BUT it was too variable and the amount slipped upwards! I can't afford for Luna to gain weight like she did using the mug measure so each meal is measured out. I do allow for leftovers and/or treats and activity levels but still use the scales.

 

I imagine weighing IS more accurate. When I was making up home cooked dog food recipes it was obvious one batch of rice, say, retained more liquid than another. When I put the stuff in containers to freeze and store they'd be full to different levels. Kibble probably isn't as bad though. And in winter when we are more active and I have to up the food I just guess at adding a bit more, don't measure or weigh it. Instead of a level scoop I might feed a rounded one.

 

We (me and OH) always used a measuring vessel with previous labs. OH feeds mornings an' Me evenings and (love OH to bits) but OH did pile it up a bit.
With Juice I decided to go weigh and scales!! I have a little sealed box so we can weigh and leave the next meal for each other 😀 It becomes an easy habit 😀
TBH, I've got big hands for a female and couldn't resist measuring a handful, it can vary between 30grams and 50grams!!! (No discussions on a handful please, this is a public forum 😈 )
If a new owner happens to read this discussion, please weigh the food, depending on exercise and not on how much you love them or their cute face 😏 🐾

Chel and Juice xx 🐾🐾

 

I will weigh out a new food then pour it in my usual scoop to see where it comes to, from then on I do it by eye but check the dog regularly for loss or gain and adjust accordingly.

 

What does it matter if your dog gets a little more one day and a little less another? I'm sure you do with your own meals. In fact I'd add that in all possibility it's more healthy for your dog, and certainly mimics what would happen in the wild.

There is so much rubbish talked about feeding dogs, and much of it by the dog food manufacturers who have a vested interest in dog owners becoming a captive market. One of the big myths is that you must always feed the same food or your dog will get a gippy tummy. Follow this myth and it will become a self fulfilling prophecy! Feed the same thing long enough and the dog will loose the ability to process anything different. But dogs by nature are opportunist feeders. In the wild they will eat whatever presents it's self, be it what it has caught and killed, whatever carrion it finds or even nuts and berries if that's all it finds that day. The same thing can be said about a balanced diet. There is simply no need for every single meal to be balanced. As opportunist feeders it certainly would not be in the wild, but like us, their bodies are capable of balancing out over the longer term. Think about yourself. One day it might be a full roast meal, another day a salad and another day fish and chips. Not exactly balanced, but over the course of a few days, unless you are living on crazy food, your body will get everything it needs, and exactly the same thing applies to your dog.

I never weigh my dogs food any more than I weigh my own. Yes I feed a proprietary dog food, but I also add in any of my leftovers and just guess the amount of dog food to allow for the human food. As to what human foods, almost anything. Some human foods, onion for example can be dangerous in large quantities, but the little onion they will get from my leftover liver and onion is certainly not going to be enough to do any harm, so I just pick out the obvious bits. Yesterday it was macaroni cheese, today was a little gravy from my roast chicken and tomorrow will be chicken pasta with tomato and basil sauce. I started Chloe in this just as soon as she came home at 8 weeks old, just as I did with Amy and all the dogs which came before. The dogs love the variation and have rock solid digestion systems.

Regards, John

 

Think the problem is a little more one day tends to creep into a little more the next day and then the next John! At least in my experience!
Luna's arthritis is so bad nowadays that half a kilo up and her discomfort and activity levels decrease. I know when she is a low weight because she is a nightmare in terms of behaviour and the word bonkers and crazy come out my mouth a lot more. So she gets leftovers in her daily kongs, gets scraps of lunch and training treats galore, sardine additions to meals etc BUT her main kibble weigh out remains the same within a couple of grams or is reduced if she is on rest from injury or similar.
Have had to learn to control her food intake for her own good and <cough> to ensure I lost some of my own excess kilos earlier this year I was weighing my own portions of food too!

People are so unused to seeing labradors the correct weight where we seem to walk/visit that I regularly get
1) told they aren't actually real labradors but crosses!
2) told they can't be 8 and 6 years old as they look like puppies!
I shall keep weighing

 

LOL, JohnW, at my house it's not so much me who needs to measure the food. YEs, a bit more one day and bit less another is not going to hurt. But with my OH it's never the bit less and the bit more tends to keep getting to be more and more. As Luna-Tuck says, sort of.

 

Well put John! A reasonably healthy balanced varied diet does no-one, man or dog, any harm!

You seem to hear a lot these days about dogs with allergies/intolerance to certain things and I wonder of it's a product of the dog food industry?

 

I knows few dogs that have allergies and they are just kibble fed with nothing else. Cola is kibble fed mainly but gets a lot of other things too. She's a lab and would eat anything if she could get away with it :]

 

I weigh out Colas food but she does get a varied diet.

If on days she just gets mostly kibble then I weigh it as it doesn't take too much extra of it for her to have a slightly runny bum. There are other days she gets lots of variety, scrambled egg today for breakfast.

She has some pheasant yesterday, pigeon the day before. She gets raw meat often too when I'm cutting stuff up and there's left overs.

If she's lucky enough to get away with nicking something cooling on the table when I'm not looking then yeah she can have a very varied diet &#55357;&#56834;

 

You seem to hear a lot these days about dogs with allergies/intolerance to certain things and I wonder of it's a product of the dog food industry?

It's more than just allergies and intolerance we have to worry about. The additives BHT and BHA are often used to prevent fat from going rancid. In other words, companies are able to use older raw meats in their food. But there is strong evidence that both are carcinogenic. If a manufacturer uses them by law they must declare it, so you would think if it's not on the food wrapper, whether tin of sack, you would be fine. But sadly that's not so. We went into this in great detail on another forum some time ago and it appears that the food manufacturers buy their meat products form wholesalers and if the wholesaler puts the additives in then the food manufactures do not need to declare it. They only have to declare what they themselves add, not what was added before they get the meat, so you have no way of knowing what additives are in the food. We could be feeding our dogs, (and our selves for that matter) cancer forming chemicals) OK, with ourselves we tend to vary what we eat, so probably don't eat such things as BHT and BHA every day, but many people feed their dog exactly the same thing every meal so they cannot escape it.

Worrying!

Regards, John

 

I never used to weigh Grahams food out. I think I did once, and then put it into my scoop to see what it looked like and then just went by that every day. I think it slowly crept up though as out of curiosity I weighed a scoop the other day and it was almost double what he should be having for his weight! No wonder he was looking a little heavier.

So from now on weighing it He does have extras though such as left over meat, veg and treats throughout the day which I don't subtract from his meals as I don't feel the need to.

 

He does have extras though such as left over meat, veg and treats throughout the day which I don't subtract from his meals as I don't feel the need to.

No wonder he was looking a little heavier

Regards, John

 

You should not to have to weigh the food to realise he was looking a little heavy, that's putting the cart before the horse. You should realise he looks a little heavy and cut the amount of food straight away. Had when you weighed the food you found it to be the same as usual what would you have done, continued feeding the same amount even though he was getting heavy, or would you realise, (correctly) that you were feeding too much regardless of the weight of the food?

What I'm getting at is, there is a correct amount of food for every dog, but it's not the same for every dog. The guide is the appearance of the dog, not the weight of the food. The appearance and feel is the all important thing.

Regards, John

 

To be honest I put it down to him maturing! I'm, always being told the usual 'he is skinny for a lab' and lately he has filled out.

Clearly his 'filling out' was just due to overfeeding! But he does look better for it, as he is an active dog I think what would have been fat has just created an extra layer of muscle. Sort of when bodybuilders 'bulk' over the winter!

 

I believe in measured meals on scales. It takes me about 10 seconds and removes any guesswork and mystery.

It might be useful to separate puppies and adults. Puppyhood is what I struggled with the most. More frequent meals means a higher margin for error, and maybe it's just me lacking experience, but I found it incredibly difficult to judge body condition on a forever changing puppy gaining weight and size and going through growth spurts etc. I can judge her condition far better now she's an adult with a level playing field.

In my own case, I totally lost my grip on Gemma's weight in year one and it was a big wake up call to take a new approach. That meant weighing every meal to the gram and accounting for treats and snacks properly.

I also remember a segment on a TV show about obesity in dogs where they did an experiment with a bunch of owners. They were asked to portion their meals using their usual measure by cup or scoop, yet when checked on scales there was a significant variance. Ok, perhaps edited for TV and effect, but in every case shown they were overfeeding by using "loose" measures. The lesson was simple - just weigh your portions properly!