My dog is a healthy weight. Should I increase their daily food intake?

Suggested serving sizes are recommendations for the "average" dog and vary greatly depending on the ingredients and nutritional value of the food. If your dog keeps a consistant good weight, is healthy and has a shiny hair coat, then you are doing everything right. When in doubt take him to your vet for a weigh in and Body Condition Scoring. Usually this is a free service offered by your veterinarian,

The amount and type of food can have varying caloric contents. Attaching pictures of the feeding guidelines on the packaging and an accurate body weight of Snowy can help us determine if you are feeding the correct amounts.

If you can’t increase the volume of food the pups will eat, try to increase the calorie content. Also making sure you feed a high quality food will ensure that the pups absorb the nutrients appropriately. I like Royal Canin and Purina Pro Plan. You will find information about the calories on the side of the package. They are called Kcalories in dog food. I hope this is helpful and please feel free to post any additional questions.

First, I think it is important to determine Malia's ideal weight for her size. If your vet says she is underweight, then you may need to make some changes. But if she a good weight at 32 pounds, then eating a couple cups of food a day should be adequate for her weight. My 30 pound dog only eats about 1 cup per day. Don't forget that it is much healthier for a dog to be a little lean. If Malia is underweight, then you may need to look at foods that are more dense in calories. You can consider some of the super premium foods like Natural Balance, Wellness Core or Orijen which tend to have more bio-available calories in each cup. You may also consider The Honest Kitchen which is a dehydrated food and dense in calories. https://www.thehonestkitchen.com/ Good luck! I hope that was helpful. Thanks for using PetCoach.

This is a good question! Many pet parents would not be aware of a change in caloric density depending on brand and type of food. If this is a new brand that you have just started very recently I would recommend continuing with the same measurement/quantity of food as you have previously been giving Chloe and monitor her for weight loss. If she has been on the new food for a little while and you feel she has lost some weight then increasing the amount you feed would certainly be beneficial to help her maintain weight. As you have stated though, increasing her food consumption could result in potential weight gain which is not a good thing. If you need to increase her intake then do it by only a very small amount, make sure you are carefully measuring her daily allowance of food, and monitor her weight carefully with weekly 'weigh ins' at your regular vet clinic.

Although its a little hard to tell from the photo both of your pups look to be lean with good muscle mass. To assess body condition what you want to look for are a waist behind the ribs when viewed from above, and that you can feel but not see the spine and ribs. Young active dogs are certainly apt to be a bit leaner. You could certainly consider a diet for active large breed dogs, especially for the Dane mix. To figure out how much to feed you need to know two things. First, you need to find out how many calories are in a cup of your current food. This is sometimes written on the bag or you can go online to the foods website and typically find it. It would be written kcal/cup for dry or kcal/can for canned. Second, you need to figure out what the energy requirements for your dogs are. This will be different for different weights of dogs and for dogs with different lifestyles. A good website to go to to help you with this is the Ohio State University Pet calorie calculator. If you Google OSU dog calorie calculator it should pop up. This will show you how to calculate the energy requirement for your dogs based on their weights, and let you know what factor to multiply by for their lifestyle. Then basically when you know how many calories they should be taking in per day you can figure out how much to feed. Keep in mind if you do this and change the amount you are feeding, if you are seeing weight loss or excessive weight gain you will have to adjust the plan as it's not a perfect system. I hope this helps and thank you for using Petco Pet Education Center, formerly Petcoach!

It’s alright to increase the food since she’s thin. I like to increase the amount of food at each meal if they are very hungry. I would also feed three meals daily until she’s at a normal weight. Very active dogs need much more food than usually recommended to grow and stay at a good weight. I adjust the food depending on your dog, not what it says on the bag. Thanks for using Petco Pet Education Center, formerly Petcoach to help you care for Bruno.