Overweight Springer

Question
Hi. I saw your post to the English Springer Spaniel owner with a weight and coat problem. My female Springer all of a sudden "ballooned up" about year and a half ago and I discovered that she was eating dozens of avocados off of our tree. It put her into liver failure and I nursed her back to health. I try to watch what she eats outdoors and I have her on a restricted diet. I give her Beneful Healthy Weight dog food with a little extra something like chicken scraps etc.. sometimes. She gets a lot of exercise but does not lose any weight. She is definitely a large female as Springers go but she is about 40 percent overweight. She is almost always ravenous. I have used worming formulas on her but nothing is in her stools and it never affects her appetite. I don't know how to get the weight off of her and money is an issue as far as veterinary bills go. (The liver failure problem cost me over $2000 a year ago and I am financially worse off now then I was then) Is there something you can recommend? Thank you.

Answer
The first thing you need to do is stop all the scraps. She can't lose any weight because she is getting more than she should be and she isn't eating food that is conducive to losing weight.
Since money is a problem so that you cannot get her onto a 35 lb bag of R/D from Hill's, I suggest you start with the next best thing- Science Diet Adult Light formula.

While it is much lower in fat than your average food, it also has the fiber and optimal nutrition she needs to start to lose weight and still maintain her health. It has added  DL carnitine which has be proven to spur weight loss in dogs and humans both. It also makes their coats nice and shiny but the nutrition does that also.

Science Diet Adult Light is the only food I have found after much research on diet foods and other similarly labeled foods that is lower in fat than the rest of them. Most of the foods I tested had MORE fat per cup than the so called regular diet foods. I suspect they thought that since they were lowering the quality of the ingredients that the added fat would make up for the lack of taste in some of them.

Another thing you have to really watch is she needs to have ZERO treats and zero scraps. She can eat raw carrots for treats and you can add a half a can of green beans ( the no salt kind or rinse them out a few times) on her dry food.

No cottage cheese, no snausages, nothing like that at all. Keep her exercising and give it a good three weeks before you see any changes.
That's how long it takes to get the food into the system.
Now another thing you need to do is measure her food with an eight ounce measuring cup- the kind we cook with. She should get no more than 2 2/3 cup once a day for a 60 lb dog. That is feeding her for the weight she should be, not what she is. You need to get her weighed, the vet won't charge for it, and then pick up the bag of SD light and slowly change her over to it over a seven day period. Now she will seem hungry for the first three weeks then her appetite will even off as she gets that great, dense nutrition into her system. Then your food costs will be much less per feeding. It usually costs about .79 cents a day to feed a dog this food. That's less than a latte a day!  

So that is how you get her to lose the weight. Beneful and these other brands do not have the fixed formulation of SD. Their food changes in quality from batch to batch and they do not have the superior anti-oxidant formula that SD has. I have helped clients for over 28 yrs use this and Hill's R/D (prescription reducing diet) to get their dogs down in size. My own dog was overweight from heartworm treatment (she was a rescue) and she lost the excess weight and was so shiny the Hill's guy said she was a poster dog for R/D. She lived on it for life because it just suited her fine and didn't upset her delicate stomach either.

So start with cleaning out the house of the junk food she is eating and no more scraps. None. You must be ruthless about this or it will not work. Write down her weight and then weigh her again in one month.
If you are following this to the T then she will be losing weight.

Make sure she has no other underlying medical problems also before you start like hypothyroidism. That will make them gain weight and not have a nice coat.
Cushings is another one that will cause weight gain. There are many other symptoms that go with that problem however.

So let me know in a few weeks how it is going.