Diet and Health FAQ

Tagged As: Natural weight loss diet

Question:
I'm curious to see if anyone has found that switching their dogs to a home-cooked feeding plan has resulted in weight loss. The reason I ask is this. I've been overweight for most of my life and have had even worse trouble losing weight since I was diagnosed with Grave's Disease and treated for it (dropping my thyroid down to normal just made my problems worse). I switched to the Protein Power plan well over a year ago, which is a low-carbohydrate plan, and lost ALL but the last two lbs of my excess weight (I've lost a total of 55 lbs). Now for my dog. I have a 60 lb Border Collie who really shouldn't be over 45-50 lbs. The poor guy is just NOT losing any weight even though I've had him on only 1.5 cups of various Light dog foods per day (NO TREATS) and he gets a reasonable amount of exercise (around an hour of solid ball-fetching or frisbee-catching per day). It has definitely occurred to me, given my success with a low-carbohydrate plan in weight loss, that the high grain contents of dogfoods are not helping my hungry but overweight dog. I'm very interested in switching to a BARF-like diet to see if I can get him to lose more weight without having to drop his food volume more. He's not at all a pig with food but lately, on the measly 1.5 cups of food a day he's on, he seems to be hungry since he's always searching the floor for potential crumbs and I'm catching him perusing the kitchen trash a lot (something he wasn't doing before I cut his food back from 2 cups to 1.5 cups per day). I suspect that switching him to a home-cooked diet with less grain in it might help, but I wanted to check to see if others have found this to be helpful specifically for weight loss. This is so frustrating. My other Border Collie (Meddy, who unfortunately had to be put down last June, as some of you may recall) was also an easy keeper but I could seem to manage his weight without forcing him to be hungry all the time. I'm running out of commercial food options for hungry, porky Bishop though! Thanks in advance,

Answer:
Yes! For sure get him on a raw foods diet. Dogs are built to handle larger amounts of animal fat than humans. I'm not convinced that low fat, high carbo diets are good for humans either. High carbos/low fat is essentially a feed lot diet. The kind that's used to fatten cattle. Also, you could be overestimating how much food your dog requires to stay in shape. My German Shepherd only eats a cup and a half or so a day.