If your pet is overweight or obese you need to take action to avoid the risk of long term health problems. At its most simple, helping your pet lose weight just involves feeding less and/ or exercising more – but in reality it’s not always that easy, so here are my top 5 tips for helping your pets lose weight:
- Reduce their daily calories – either cut down the amount of food you are feeding, or change to a lower calorie diet. Your vet can help recommend a suitable diet food for you.
- Healthy snacks – if your dog or cat loves tit bits and snacks, these are often a significant part of the problem so you need to either cut out any snacks between meals, or replace them with something healthy such as raw vegetables or one of my low fat home cooking recipes.
- More exercise – this is relatively straightforward for dogs – more walks and play – but it is harder for cats. There are now some great electronic toys for cats though which can keep even the laziest cat entertained and well-exercised while you are out of the house and these are well worth a try.
- Talk to your vet – all vets are committed to helping owners help their pets to lose weight and most will run free weight clinics where nurses will offer detailed advice on target weights and specialist diets.
- Safe and steady weight loss – you should aim to help your pet lose around 1-1.5% of their body weight per week – any more could be dangerous (especially in cats) and too much less is ineffective. This equates to 300- 450g per week for a 30kg Labrador or 60-90g per week for a 6kg cat.
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