“Is my dog too fat?” “Is my dog too thin?”

These are two questions clients often ask me. Only the second one regularly gets answered: “No.”

How can you tell if your dog is fat? It is not always easy: a dog’s fur coat, like a person’s clothes, can make fat a lot less obvious.

The best way to evaluate your dog’s fitness is to feel the body through the fur rather than merely looking at the dog. A canine in good physical condition will have minimal fat layering the ribs, just enough to keep the skin from sinking in between them. There should be a narrowed waist just behind the ribs, in front of the hips, and the abdomen should tuck up rather than hanging down.

 

Cause and Effect

The cause of obesity is disarmingly simple: calories eaten are greater than calories burned. The prevention or treatment of obesity can be frustratingly difficult, however.

Let’s look at the metabolic needs of dogs, and particularly how they change through life. As puppies, our dogs need to eat for growth, maturation, basal metabolism, and activity. Growth stops well before the first year is past and maturation is complete before two years of age. The need for calories diminishes with each of those life stages, but we rarely reduce the intake accordingly. The activity of most dogs gradually diminishes as well during this period (usually to our great relief) and continues to decline later in life. This also signals a reduced need for food intake.

These changes in your dog’s caloric needs occur gradually (though much more rapidly in dogs than in people), so we often don’t notice them or fail to respond with proper dietary modification.

 

Food is Love (Not!)

As caretakers of our beloved canine companions, we delight in giving them pleasure to repay the way they enrich our lives. Most dogs exhibit enthusiasm over the food bowl, so it makes us feel good to feed them. For some dogs, the feeding ritual is the highlight of the day, as it represents loving contact and is probably the most frequently reinforced caretaking ritual in their lives. Love sponges that they are, we can hardly expect our dogs to forego food even when they aren’t really hungry.

Equating food with love isn’t the only psychological aspect of canine obesity. Just as humans do, many dogs overeat because they are bored and/or stressed. Truthfully, our dogs are often eating for pleasure rather than to satisfy an actual need for calories. If we substitute other forms of pleasure and practice some portion control, we can prevent obesity.

 

Medical Concerns

Medical problems that cause increased hunger or diminished metabolism (such as diabetes and hypothyroidism, respectively) should be ruled out if a dog seems inordinately hungry or is not losing weight despite calorie restriction. In most young or middle-aged overweight dogs, however, obesity is the primary medical problem, at least initially. Unfortunately, obesity is often just the first stop on the road to ill-health.

Many people are aware of the burgeoning human health problems associated with obesity, such as heart disease and diabetes; as a society we seem to be eating ourselves to death. Veterinarians fear that our clients may be feeding their pets to death, as well.

Dogs can suffer premature arthritis and cardiac, musculoskeletal, digestive, and respiratory problems as a result of poor dietary habits and indulgent owners.

 

Taking It Off

As with people, quick fixes for weight problems are ineffective and potentially dangerous. Faced with a mildly overweight canine patient, I recommend a twenty-percent reduction in calorie intake and a gradual increase of exercise. In the truly obese individual, increasing exercise can lead to significant damage to overloaded joint cartilage, so I recommend thirty- to forty-percent calorie restriction and non-strenuous exercise like walking -- or, even better, swimming – until some pounds have been shed. Then running and off-leash play can be gradually increased.

Owners usually find that dogs are more enthusiastic about exercise when they stop carrying around all that excess weight. Needless to say, the ability to enjoy exercising without injury makes it easier to keep the fat off, as well.

For those of us who can’t find time to exercise our dogs properly, the Bay Area offers many professional dog-walking services. My patients who have professional dog walkers are very often happy and well adjusted dogs, as well as being fit and trim. They have their own packs and enjoy canine social contact on a regular basis. I have observed that dogs with canine friends don’t seem to need as much “friendship” from the food bowl.

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I believe that if we truly love our dogs, we should feed them appropriate amounts of high quality food and provide them with plenty of exercise and play, especially with other dogs.

That’s my prescription for a healthy and truly happy canine.