The Lucky Dog Weight Loss Plan

"Around half the dogs in the United Kingdom are overweight or obese. I chose this book because what Vicky does is she analyzes and looks at the research which shows in detail what wolves and dogs eat in the wild. She then compares it to processed food and discovers that processed food contains much higher quantities of unhealthy fat and much higher amounts of carbohydrate. We feed a lot of dogs and she discovered that it wasn’t really about changing the volume of food you give a dog, or starving it. By changing from bad fats to good fats and by increasing the percentage of protein, the dog automatically loses weight. If you change the balance of the food and switch the dog to a biologically appropriate diet, the weight just falls off. She worked on that for 4-5 years, and wrote this excellent but really short book. After. Once we started we said, “Yikes, half the dogs we’ve got coming in are overweight, why is that?” Working with vets and with the dog owners, she worked out a diet that helps the dogs to lose weight without them being hungry. If only it was as easy for humans… Oh, yes, obese often. We deal with a lot of overweight dogs because we have a reputation for it now. We run a program. Sometimes there are additional problems — the dog isn’t getting enough exercise or they’re being given titbits all the time — but in the majority of cases, it’s just that they’re on a Kibble or tinned food diet and the dogs are getting overweight. It’s like us eating lots of food with the wrong fat and too much carbohydrate. We don’t have any resident dogs, but we do have a poorly dogs team and an overweight dogs team. We employ vets and veterinary nurses. You don’t have to be a customer, we’re happy to help anybody who comes to us for nutritional and health advice. That’s really been Vicky’s baby more than mine. She has someone who used to be in the pharmaceutical industry who has been with us for six years now, who heads that team up. And under her there are two vets and three veterinary nurses and that’s all they do: They provide advice. I didn’t realize you had a dog. Have you got a dog? Why aren’t we feeding your dog? Have you tried her on some mince or some chicken wings? How big is your dog? Do you buy meat anyway? Do you go to butchers? I would say it’s going to cost you more than a bag of Kibble, but if you did it yourself, using ingredients we can advise you on, it’s going to cost around 40 or 50 GBP per month. I don’t use my own company’s food, because I live in Ireland and I don’t like to ship the food over. It seems un-environmental to send food from England. I just have the local butcher give me scraps and bits and pieces. I’ve got an English Pointer who is probably about the same weight, and I reckon it costs me about 30-35 GBP a month."