How to calculate your pets Calorie requirements

How to calculate you Pets Calorie requirements, then go on to work out how much to feed them!

This guide is done by Dr Steve Rose. This is a guide for most pets, but certain life stages and disease processes do radically change the energy requirements (more later)

Step by step

1. Weight your pet reasonably accurately (come into Animal Doctors or if they are small enough, pick them up and weigh the difference on your bathroom scales with and without them)

2. Grab a calculator

( If your pet is overweight you need to calculate differently, see next post for that!)

3. Raise the weight to the power of 0.75

ie 20 kilograms to the power of 0.75 = 9.45

4. Multiply this figure by a factor depending on their life stage. Normal healthy animals that are active and exercise normally should be 120.

Ok just had a comment, huh, power of? what are we still at school? Ok if you don't have a calculator that does this strange... "power of" try GOOGLE. Search 20 to the power of 0.75!!

e.g 20kg dog - 9.45 x 120 = 1134 kilocalories over 24 hours. (Kcal)

5. Note this is Kcal (many refer to as calories), NOT joules or kilojoules.

Next step - how much to feed my animal?

Well really then I would ask - what are you typically feeding them?

Dry dog/cat food = on average 1 cup (metric cooking cup - not a large beer mug) is 360-420 Kcal per cup

Lean mince meat - 100g = 165Kcal per 100g

So a 20kg dog ROUGHLY should be utilising 1134/380 (average dry food) = 2.98 cups PER 24 HOURS

Fudge factors - Are they walked? Are they desexed? Are they sick? Are they recovering from an illness? Are they hyperactive?

There are MANY calorie counting websites for people on the web, certainly if you feed any sort of human foods or raw ingredients, search them out, and you can easily calculate how much meat, veges, rice, pasta etc they should be getting.

If on the other hand you feed predominately dry food (which we recommend), give the company a ring and ask what the calorie concentration is of their food (premium brands even have it written on the packet).

As a promo for premium foods- they are far more accurate in calculating how the animals body actually metabolises (uses) the calories, and thus it is easier to know how their body will respond to food changes.

FOR WEIGHT LOSS

Important differences

1. Calculate GOAL WEIGHT, usually in increments of 10-15% less than current weight.

2. Raise IDEAL or GOAL weight to power of 0.75 (same as before) but then multiply by only 70 (not 120)

Tips for weight loss

1. Feed in 3 separate meals to increase wight consumption of digesting multiple times!

2. Feed lower calorie specific diets such as Hills r/d to help "fill them up" (and other benefits)

3. Aim for about 1-2% weight loss per week. (no more)

Hope this helps! We get a lot of questions "how much do I feed my dog?"

Cheers

Dr Steve Rose