This, but also I should mention that the vet put my dog on purina veterinary diets. Nothing against this food, but I'm sure that feeding with other foods could still result in weight loss if you pay attention to the calories. My best friend, who hadn't seen the dog in a while, came over and said the poor thing was built like a tank.

Mine is a border collie. When I left for college, the parents didn't walk her much and my dad gave her WAY too many snacks. A border collie should weight about 45 pounds, she weighted a whopping 93. This was 3 weeks ago when we took her to the vet and got the new dog food. Feeding her 2 cups of this per day has resulted in a 5 pound weight loss. The vet says that it may take a year to get her down to a reasonable weight and then we can have her maintain it. I think this is about 1000 cal/day right now of dry food, then she can get a few hundred calories of snacks (with no snacks, she can eat 3 cups of food/day instead of 2 cups/day). We have also been taking turns walking her several times a day, a couple of short walks plus a longer one in the middle of the day.

Basically, pay attention to the snacks, because these can add up. There are lower calorie snacks you can feed, look on the websites for them for an idea of calories. Some have a lot more than you'd expect. Try to avoid human foods/table scraps too for weight loss.

My dog won't go near green beans, but I have heard that it works wonders for some dogs.

As a vet..here is my 2 cents...yes cutting down on the snacks and how much the dog gets fed may be enough. You would be surprised how quickly calories add up with kiddles and treats. If the dog loves them...raw baby carrots are a great treat. Also, like some one states earlier...loving your pets does not = feeding them to death. Studies have shown that dog's that are a normal body wt live 2-5 years longer than obese pets. They get many of the same issues as human. Increase the exercise (just like us). Keep the pets seperate when feeding so she doesn't get the other pet's food. Take away the bones for a while...yes it sort of sucks for the other pets...but honestly too many bones for dogs in general aren't good. But in many cases...perscription diets are needed. And exact measurements are needed. Sometimes everyone needs tough love even if its the pet needing it. Make sure you are always measureing the food with a measuring cup (liek us) and minmize snacks. And watch fatty dog foods and treats. Just like us...we need to minimize calories. As a vet i do believe in the perscription diets..i have seen some sucess with minimizing the amount of fodd the pet gets..but sometimes...we all need help and the prescpition diets help by increasing the fiber and decreasing the calories. Just like when we are trying to loose wt. Good luck!

Fred was always fit until a few years ago when I went thru a divorce. I moved in with my parents. My dad insisted on keeping the cat food on the floor.. Fred would eat it up! He quickly packed on the pounds!

As soon as I moved into my own place- he was no longer getting a steady diet of cat food and the weight just melted off. Dad was amazed at how much longer the cat food was lasting after we moved out too!

Although I have always fed a high quality kibble, I did try a raw meat diet on Fred for a while. After a few months on that, he was in the best shape I had EVER seen him in. I tried kibble again for a few months and already can see a little bit of belly flab again, its not fat, just some flab...so back onto the raw.

Advantage of the raw is his teeth were also cleaner.

My dog would not have lost weight if not for being on his thyroid medication. He had to take 2 little yellow pills every day & the weight melted off. He went from looking like a blanched pecan to a regular dachshund in about 6 months. (He was a rescue & the former owners also fed him canned dog food, we switched him to dry food, too)

My dog while growing up was a chunky girl.....then we found out she had no thyroid, and she dropped all the weight once she went on a pill.

My brother's dog got fat and the vet told him to feed her green beans. She LOVES green beans and she lost all the weight she needed to.

I have a friend who makes her own "dog food" for her dog. Mostly it's whatever she's got in the house, working off a list of foods that are good for/safe for dogs. Lots of beans, rice, tomatoes....not sure what else. Her dog will eat just about anything given to her. She said her vet seemed fine with it.

I'm glad your pup is taking off some weight! The veggies do work so stick with it.

When my old girl got pudgy, I reduced her food and supplimented canned pumpkin in it's place, I also reduced the number of snacks. We were fairly active so the weight melted off, she ended up losing 7 pounds and being a healthy 37lbs until she passed in February at 15 1/2 years.

I have a bassett hound, and they are known to be a bit chubby,,well mine is more than a bit chubby. We cut back her food, and she only gets baby carrots for a treat. She was doing really well, you could even see a little waist on her until she developed further skin issuses than what she already had and re-occuring bladder infections. The poor girl even developed an allergy to the meds for the bladder infection so we had to put her on another med to stop the itching that was making her skin raw. After 6 months of bladder infections they put her permenantly on perscription dog food to help reduce struvites in her urine that cause bladder infections. So now we are infection free but the meds for the itch is known to cause weight gain...so we are no further ahead. Has anyone dealt with this kind of situation before?

My dog is starting to get a little pudgy too. He's a springer spaniel and most of the older ones I've seen around are fat. I switched him to lower calorie food and he's never gotten many table scraps. A saying I read once keeps going through my head "if your dog is overweight you aren't getting enough exercise" :lol: I think that is the root of the problem.

For my little girl (14.5 lb optimum weight) we found that we had to weigh out her food rather than measure it. She gets 34g twice a day. If we bump it up to 40g she starts to gain. Also, the kibble density varies from bag to bag, which is why we weigh it rather than just measure it.

Treats are normally something like baked chicken, and we make them very small, about 1/2 the size of a pea or less.

Don't forget the benefit of a food dispenser rather than a bowl of food. This lets them work for their food and it takes longer for them to eat it, so they feel more satisfied when they finish. Like us when we slow down our eating, we feel fuller with less food.

Good luck (o:

When my dog looks a little chubby I throw his toys into the pool and let him swim for them. He loves it and it's great exercise for his hips since he has hip dysplasia. I'm also trying to teach him to walk on a leash - he's got this huge problem of slipping out of his body harness and his chain and chasing after cars (he used to be so scared of them but still won't willingly go in one). He's bloody fast that I'm afraid to take him out even with double leashes.

a very simple solution to the weight problem: raw food diet. many dogs eat too much because they don't get enough chew satisfaction with their meals.

give her a good-sized knuckle bone. she'll spend so much time gnawing on it that she won't be worried about not eating food.

my dog's a border collie mix (or a throwback, as he was only one of two dogs in the litter looking like flat-coated retrievers with st john's markings - the rest were black and white BC), weighs about 70lbs in prime condition.

ever since he was a pup, he's only ever gotten raw meat and bones, veg, and fruit - sometimes i cook the food: he only eats broccoli if it's cooked but cooked carrots make him gag.

when i see he's getting a little porky (i do the rib test every week - run the hands down the sides of the dog and you should be able to easily feel but not actually see the ribs) i cut back his meat by a cpl ounces. right now, he gets about 400gr/day because he's nowhere near as active as he was in the middle of the bush.

it's also cheaper to feed him from the discount meat bin at the grocery store (same meat everybody, human and animal, in the house eats) than it is to buy him bagged stuff.


this is dandy (short for "Dandelion") - even in interior flourescent lighting, you can see the sheen on his coat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQqa8ca9VE0

Nilla used to be a chunky monkey. She was 77 pounds on a very small Lab:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7115/6...53d26af6c0.jpg

That was taken in October 2011. She's over a year old in that picture - and FAT!

Because she has hip dysplasia and it was getting worse, I really started to work with her. She went from 4 cups of food a day down to 1 cup because we really didn't do much. She got about 30 minutes of exercise a day before I went to work, but beyond that she just lazed around in the house. As we got more active, I upped her intake to 1 cup twice a day.

She lost about 10 pounds in 3-1/2 weeks, which was great, but she was still chunky. So I kept at it. Walks don't do much; she really has to run to burn off the calories. I just used her training as ways of getting her to run (which she's always loved to do).

Since moving home, she gets lots of exercise with my dad's dog Maggie (Nilla's great-aunt) and still only gets 2 cups of food per day (high quality, Orijen food). I also try to take her (and Maggie, b/c Maggie is overweight too) out at least a few times a week. Whether that's for a 2 km walk or for a run. Today we went for a 45 minute hike up a large hill, yesterday we did training with them and the day before we went ice fishing and they ran beside dad's argo (8-wheeled amphibian vehicle) across the lake (about a 2/4 mile round trip plus lots of running around while out there).

I thought she had lost weight, and then I picked her up about 2 days ago. That surprised me. In January, I couldn't pick her up, even from my bed. She was still too heavy. So I carried her over to the scale, stepped on it (it's not digital,urgh), quickly looked down to get a guesstimate weight and then subtracted it from my current (disgusting) weight.

She's down to around 55 pounds! This is pretty close to being right on target for normal for her breed, age, and gender. I think she could lose a bit more but Labs always do tend to have a layer of fat on them because of their need to dive in to chilly waters to retrieve ducks, so I don't want her to be super skinny.

This is her yesterday:
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7100/7...51b6ba6ba8.jpg

She's still got a bit more fat around her haunches there than I'd like, but compared to what she looked like in October, I think she's done excellent.

The key is, like with us, calories in must be less than calories out (or calories out should be more than calories in, whichever way you want to say it). Read the amount of calories per cup in the dog food you're feeding. For mine, it's around 480 per cup. She was getting 4 cups. That's nearly 2000 calories a day - more than even I am supposed to eat! I know 1 cup twice a day doesn't seem like much, but don't forget they have smaller stomachs than we do! We, of course, wouldn't be satisfied with 2 cups of food a day - but with their smaller stomachs, there's no reason they shouldn't be. Be careful of how much the bag says to give them - my bag says to give her (at 55 pounds now) 3-4 cups a day. That's WAY too much!

Exercise is another key. Lots of exercise - high intensity exercise chasing balls, climbing things, etc. What were corgis originally bred for? See if you can maybe incorporate some of the mannerisms in to your play. Retrievers were bred to retrieve, so even if we didn't use them to bring back birds, we can still meet that breed need by throwing balls, frizbees, bumpers, sticks, etc. They also love to swim, so we can capitalize on that in the summer by taking them to lakes to swim (and we have a pool so that helps too).

Also - bones don't seem harmful but marrow is PURE FAT! With Nilla, I could not take her bones away when I lived on my own because that's what she chewed on and entertained herself with while I was at work for 8hours. Since being here, she's had only 1 bone. You can try substituting the marrow in her bones with cottage cheese mixed with some of her kibble. Freeze it overnight and then give it to her - but only give her half of her kibble in the bowl when it comes to feeding time. Kongs are also great toys - filled with cottage cheese (low fat) and kibble, then frozen. They stimulate her mentally and she gets her food at the same time without the extra calories and fat from the bones. OR you can scoop some of the marrow out of the bones if you want. We always given them to the dogs frozen, so that's not a possibility with us.

Hope that helps!

These are all such great ideas. Our black lab is quite "portly" and she too will wolf down her food and then try to get our husky's. They also figured out how to get into the fridge a couple years ago, to the point where we had to put a metal hasp lock on it to keep them out. If someone forgets to lock it it's goodbye groceries. I'm going to have to try the green beans with her-there is literally NOTHING she won't eat, so she'll think she's getting a treat.

Unless a dog is being closely monitored by a vet, they (like us humans) should not loose more than 1-2% per week (so 0.7-1.5 lbs/wk for Nilla). Nilla was loosing 3.7-4% per week, so in my opinion, her food was cut just a little too drastically. If a dog needs to be on such a drastic diet, please please make sure they are being medically supervised throughout their severe diet restrictions.

It was imperative she lose the weight because of her hip dysplasia and her arthritis. I had x-rays done on her in December 2010 and another set in October 2011 (after she had a lot of difficulty moving around after a run in the park). The second x-rays showed progression of her dysplasia along with the addition of arthritis in a dog under the age of 2. The faster she lost the weight, the better. Between October 2011 and January 2012 I spent $1500 on vet bills including the x-rays, blood work, exams, pain medication, etc. She was weighed by the vet every 2 weeks, along with a mini-exam. The vet knew how much she was being fed and had no trouble with it.

Between October 15th-ish and March 25, she's lost between 20-22 pounds (I don't know her EXACT weight at the moment); that's in the span of 24 weeks, which I don't feel is really very excessive. She did not lose any muscle mass, nor was she ever lethargic from lack of energy or have really any adverse effects other than like a typical Lab, she still wanted food (and still does - wolfing her food down and then bolting to look for the other bowls to see if there's any left) but she did that when she was getting more food before.

I definitely agree with making sure your vet is following along and is in the know about what you're doing with your pet. If the vet has any concerns, I'd definitely heed them because ultimately THEY are the professional. :)