How to get my dog to lose weight?

[JustBeingJuliet]

7 yo neutered bitch, collie x poodle. Ideal weight is about 11-12kg but recently she's put on weight and is now 15kg (had a very long course of steroids and ballooned!).

The vet used a calculator thing and said she should be getting about 660 calories a day, which is 180g of the kibble I feed. She has a few treats as well; 2 or 3 small biscuits on each walk usually as training treats, plus a piece of dried tripe or similar when I go out and leave her, so I've reduced the amount of kibble and she has two meals of about 75g each. She's walked twice a day; morning for about an hour of ball chasing/running around with her friends, then late afternoon for 30-45 minutes off lead mooching around.

She's not losing any weight and is permanently hungry :( Her stomach is properly rumbling tonight and she's looking at it in disgust!

Any tips? Where am I going wrong?

Meant to say the 660 calories is based on her being about 11kg, not based on what she is now.

I'm interested in this too as my cocker is overweight too largely I think to his epilepsy meds but also he is being looked after by family whilst we are abroad and think he may be given too many treats which I've asked them to stop. He's currently on James wellbeloved but I'm wondering if he needs to be changed. It's awful when they are hungry and looking accusingly at you :(

Commercial diet food. Ask your vet. Minimises hunger while maintaining nutrition. And stick rigidly to the plan. What looks like a small treat to us can be the caloric equivalent of snarfling down a Big Mac when you are just 11kg (or whatever).

Mine was on Markus Muhle cold pressed but the recommended amounts for that are minuscule and she was never happy. I've switched her onto another grain free food which allows me to feed more quantity, as I thought this might help her feel fuller but it doesn't seem to be working. My one year old JRT seems to eat way more than she does, but he's a skinny little thing!

I meant to say, you are quite right about the steroids and phenobarb undermining your diet efforts. It's a battle.
Also the variation in metabolism between individual animals is enormous.
My setter eats about four times the calories of his slightly heavier labrador colleague and has ribs showing as soon as he skips a meal.

We always feed dieting animals for the weight we want them to be hence the 660 kcal for an 11kg dog. As previously said a lot of the commercial weight loss diets personally I have found the newer ones that are formulated to increase metabolic rate much more successful than the older style that have reduced calories.

I feed my large dogs royal canin satiety which I have found to be great - they have lost weight on it without being hungry all the time. My golden retriever was constantly hungry on other foods and although he will still (when he is well) snap up a tasty morsel that might drop on the floor he isn't constantly looking for food any more.

If you use a measuring cup, throw it out and weigh the food instead. The vet faculty at Liverpool - the UK fatness experts- did a study getting people to measure out food by eye, with a cup and with scales. As expected, all the "by eye" amounts were too much, but interestingly, so were the amounts measured in the cup - by varying degrees but everyone was still giving too much. The scales don't lie.

Also, make sure nobody else is feeding her anything.

Agreed you may well need to change the diet too.

Perhaps worth getting thyroid bloods checked though depends how recently she was on steroids as they affect the results.

Yes I do weigh it. I weigh the full daily amount out into a cup in the morning and then use that over the day. No one else is feeding her anything; I'm 100% sure of that, as there's only me and Ds here and he won't give the dogs anything without asking me first.

The steroids finished around Christmas and we've been battling to get the weight off her ever since but it's not shifting. She's always been the perfect weight and I've never had to think about it before, but the steroids really seem to have screwed up her metabolism.

I'm looking at low calorie foods now, but they all seem to contain grain, which has a tendency to make her itch, so I might have to experiment with that a bit!

Raw food.
If you use mostly game, quail and chicken bulked out with fruit and veg should be nice and low in fat.

All good advise I am sure. I can only add that an extra 60 minute walk a day may also help

Unfortunately, I don't have an extra hour a day spare otherwise I would certainly walk them more. I've tried raw with her before and she just wasn't that keen; it was a lot of effort for her to turn her nose up at it!

I'm going to look at changing her food to something a bit lower in fat I think.

Raw carrots and no treats until the weight comes off..

People keep recommending raw carrots as a treat but I've never had a dog that will touch them!

Trouble is, as you say, the lower fat foods are bulked out with grain.
Grain, in large amounts anyway, in not good for a dog, much less for a collie x as collies are famous for tummy issues!

I honestly would try raw again using game as it's very low fat, start by offering it cooked then cook it less and less and less.
If your butcher does wood pigeon, that's quite cheap, you could try her with a bit cooked and see if she likes it.

Re carrots, mine will eat these and broccoli if cooked till soft but not a chance raw.

Yes every dog I've had will eat them cooked but not raw. There's an old chap who walks his JRT on my local park and always has a pocket full of raw carrot, waxing lyrical about how wonderful it is and how much his dog loves it - the dog happily takes it, then discretely spits it out when he's not looking! There's chunks of slightly chewed raw carrot EVERYWHERE

Have you tried something like Nature's Menu? It's ready prepared raw food.

I weigh her food out - about 10 days worth at a time and put it into little bags inside her food tub. That way any of us can grab a bag for her at meal times and I know it is the right amount. Change to a "light" food.

No treats whatsoever apart from if we have green beans then she will get three or four of them chopped up (cooked) on top of her food.

An extra walk a day. I use the RunKeeper app on my phone which enables me to see how far we walk.

Ddog managed to lose half a kilo in four weeks (she had gone up to 8.8kg - should be around 7). We are back at the vets next Monday for a further weigh in.

I used to have a patterdale who'd have walked over hot coals for raw carrot!

I'd scrap all the "treats"... Nothing but the kibble (or add plain vegetables if she'll eat them). Slow down meals by feeding out of a buster cube, or an old lemonade bottle or whatever. For training, use a handful of the day's allowance of kibble. It's too easy to derail the calorie allowance for little nutritional gain with extras.

And for god's sake ignore the sad eyes!