How Much Should I Feed My Dog?

Ever wondered how many calories your dog actually needs each day? Dr. Gabrielle Fadl breaks down the key factors that influence your dog’s energy requirements and explains exactly how to keep them at a healthy weight.

TRANSCRIPT

Need help figuring out how many calories your dog should eat in a day? We're here to help. I'm Dr. Gabrielle Faddle and this is Rory. Calculating your dog's calorie needs is really important to ensure that you're not over or underfeeding and ensuring that they are at a healthy body weight. To start to calculate your dog's energy requirements, you need to calculate their daily energy requirements or deer. This is the amount of calories your dog needs uh to maintain a healthy body weight depending on how much exercise they're expending in a day, their age, whether they're spayed or neutered, or if they have any disease processes. So before we talk about deer, we need to talk about reer, which is resting energy requirements. This is the minimum number of calories that your pets needs in order to survive. The first thing you'll want to do is convert their body weight from pounds to kg. You'll do this by dividing their weight by 2.2 and that's your weight in kilog. After that, you want to raise that to the 75. Afterwards, you multiply that by 70 and that's your rear. Let's use Rory as an example. Rory is 25 lbs today. We'll divide that by 2.2 to get her weight in kilogram, which is 11.36. Then you'll raise that number to the 75, which is 6.19. Lastly, we'll multiply that number by 70, which is 433. So this would be Rory's reer, which is her resting energy requirements. To get her daily energy requirements from that number, we'll have to factor in certain multipliers that take into account her age, her activity level, and whether or not she's spayed or neutered. Feel free to pause and take a screenshot if you need. So, going back to our example, Rory, her reer was 433. Rory is under 4 months old, so we'll need to multiply that number by 3 in order to get her deer. That gives us $12.99, which is how many calories she should be eating in a day. Keep in mind, this number will change rapidly as they are growing. So, you want to check in with your vet quite frequently just to make sure you're not overfeeding your dog as they mature. You might see the calories listed on your dog food bag as kal or kilo calories. That's essentially the same thing. So, don't worry if you're seeing that versus calories. Remember, everything your pet eats counts. So, you need to factor in any treats or any extra goodies into that calculation. Hopefully, this was helpful information and helping you figure out how much to feed your dog. We'll see you next time.