Hi,
Help me out here…I have two fat dogs and they need to loose weight.
I generally vary their diet with lite dry food and add meat and other scraps.
Should I put them on Meltdown?
Anyone out there had this problem with their animals… Anyone got an idea of the real caloric requirements of a medium size dog?
Don’t feed your dogs any human food or table scraps! Keep them on a strict diet of dog food only. You’ll probably need to get something like Science Diet specifically made for overweight dogs. And get them out and running and exercising more!
GPP, fuck, we pull sleds. Why can’t they?
If you want your dogs to be in the best shape possible feed them their natural diet. Meat and primarily meat. Eliminate the poisonous low-quality corn-based dog foods and feed them cheap cuts of meat and organ meats. I have used this diet on my dogs over the years and my vet routinely proclaimed them the most fabulous animals around. It is not any more expensive than feeding them “normal” dog food either.
Well, I have cats, and for the purposes of this thread, I am going to assume that they are physiologically similar to dogs. One of my cats got diabetes, and so the vet had me switch their food to a low sugar, high fibre food. Most of the food you would get at the grocery store is quite high in simple carbs (read: sugar). Anyways, both of my cats get the same food, and on this new diet, my other cat, who was obese, has lost a lot of weight. Just something to consider.
What kind of dogs do you have? As to the meat raw and chopped I guess? I have a one year old boxer who has thrived on nothing but dry science diet but I hve heard some others expouse your approach and am a curious.
tinman
I slightly cook commercial meats to kill the bacteria, and chop it up. Venison I will give them raw. I also give them my leftovers when I eat steak (every day). I’ve had a rottie, lab, beagle, and husky/german shepard mut. If you are looking for more information you could check out Neanderthin by Ray Audette, where I got the idea from. He explains how dogs became domesticated when wolves and humans teamed up to hunt meat. Very interesting actually. Among other things, he explains why dogs have ridiculously high cancer rate due to the foods they eat. Good stuff. Also you don’t have to worry about serving sizes, as the dogs won’t overeat…well except for the beagle 
Also tinman, if you’d like to do a little experiment, you could yourself try just eating meats/fruits/veggies/nuts for a few days, and your resulting energy levels will convince you your dog would do well on a similar diet, although dogs don’t need fruits/veggies.
If it’s a meaty dog like a rott, dobie, or pit, regular food/meat is fine, probably better than most dog food. If you do feed 'em dog food though, and the amount recommended on the label, don’t give them real food in addition. Cut back on one or the other. And make sure to walk and run 'em. If they’re really porky, try to get them swimming till they drop some pounds.
We had this problem and fixed it simply by making the dogs eat in different rooms. Sometimes they eat more than they can stomach if they think the other will get more.