Today’s talk is about at-home care measures pet guardians can take to manage their pet’s weight. With your family veterinarian, an ideal body weight for your pet should be discussed so that you can help ensure they stay at an optimal healthy weight and body condition. Although the beginning of this talk will be about obesity management, the suggested tips for tracking your pet’s at-home weight can be used for pets that are underweight or as a general wellness measure of how their weight is trending over a period of time or until their next biannual or annual veterinary visit.

Being significantly overweight to cause medical concern or what we call obesity has become an extremely important health problem in the Western world, not just for humans, but for dogs and cats as well.

The good news is weight management can become an easy daily routine to establish in the household and can be the most cost-effective and health-effective ways to maintain and improve your pet’s quality of life. As a pet guardian you are the voice and primary caregiver of your pet. Your pets trust in your love and decisions you make on their behalf to ensure they live a happy healthy lifetime with you. Part of this at-home weight management process will be for you to be patient, establish a trusting relationship with your veterinarian so that you can voice the concerns of your pet at at-home progress. In turn your family veterinarian will provide follow-up recommendations. If you feel recommendations may be difficult to attain, discuss and be open with your veterinarian. Without knowing what you feel your pet needs, it is hard for your family veterinarian to generate a plan of care that will work for you, what you feel represents the needs of your pet (remember you are the voice of your pet) without compromising best health advice to achieve the common goal you share with your veterinarian—that is to ensure your pet shares a happy and healthy lifetime with you.

Being patient with yourself and your pet, consistent in their feeding schedules and recommendations your veterinarian advises are important considerations to a successful at-home weight management program.  More importantly before starting your pet on weight management, you as the guardian should become consciously aware as to why it is important for your pets to be on this program. I always feel any decisions that you make in life, and it extends beyond starting your pet on a weight control program, it can be about what job you want to apply for, relationships you want in your life, a place you want to visit—these decisions are more real or true to the individual if they come to the decision to make this commitment for themselves. Do your own research, ask yourself if it would make you happy for your pet to be at a healthy weight, speak to your own family veterinarian for support so that you can understand for yourself and become familiar with why it is important to establish weight management goals. In this way, you become empowered in the care and health decisions of your pet and your life.

Complications of overweight pets can be costly not only in a monetary sense to manage, but more vitally excessive weight costs our pets a chance for a good quality of life. Here are several of the following complications:

Joint pain or early development of arthritis from excess weight on their limbs that are not accustomed or evolved to carry this extra weight requiring potential surgery or even a lifetime of medications to ease the pain that have precautionary side-effects.

Type II diabetes mellitus as tissues start to develop resistance in taking up sugar in the blood from even a regular meal requiring treatment with daily injections of insulin.

Respiratory disease as extra fat insulation around the chest makes it harder or requires more work to move the respiratory muscles. This in turn causes a decreased ability for the chest to expand and inflate the lungs with air. Also, fat around throat structures restricts airway passage down our trachea/windpipe causing resistance to airflow making it difficult to breathe.

Heat Stroke develops more readily in our overweight pets as well during the warmer months. Also a severe medical concern when it develops.

Liver failure from fatty liver disease in cats that are overweight can develop more readily if they are not eating as well. It is called fatty liver disease or the medical term, hepatic lipidosis, because fat from tissues within the body naturally are mobilized to provide calories if our cats are not eating. If our cat is overweight, a large amount of fat is mobilized at once and is taken up by liver cells. The liver is a specialized organ used to metabolize and detoxify the body. With liver cells filled up to the brim with fat, the functional parts of the liver cell essentially gets “crushed” or “gummed up” that they liver can no longer do its job. This leads to liver failure and causes our cats to become nauseous because of toxin build up and discomfort.

When our pets are overweight, they also have difficulty grooming themselves so their fur becomes dull, they develop fur matts. Fur matts are like dread locks, but they are quite uncomfortable as they can be flush to the skin pulling it tight, causing pain and discomfort. Their skin can develop scales, sores and bacterial infection.

All of these aforementioned complications negatively affect the health of our pets and reduce their lifespan. Another consideration is some of these diseases may require surgery to alleviate, but because of overweight issues especially with the aforementioned respiratory diseases or systemic illness that can develop from obesity, they are not ideal surgical candidates due to anesthetic risk.

Now I will talk about at-home care measures pet guardians can take to help their pets achieve and keep optimal body weight.

Exercise—yes exercise is great, but for overweight pets, strenuous or over-exercise can be harmful especially on the joints. Excessive activity on joints already bearing more weight than they are adapted to bear, can cause ligamental injury of the limbs requiring surgery. Also, when exercise is started when a pet is overweight, it can cause respiratory issues for the complications discussed earlier. Fat around the chest and throat regions can make breathing more difficult for our overweight pets and also cause them to overheat. Before starting your pet on a more active exercise regimen, it will be priority to get their weight slimmed down first. In the meantime, short leash-walks, keep your pets in cool environments and even swimming rather than running or strenuous play at the outset. Speak to your family veterinarian about some more gentler exercise options that your pet can be started.

So, what at-home options are there to get their weight safely down? Calorie restriction.

From a physical examination, your family veterinarian will help you find out an ideal weight for you pet based on their current body condition. Your family veterinarian will grade your pet’s body condition based on a 9 scale or 5 scale. The higher the number, the more severe the ramifications are for your pet that is overweight.

Then, based on the current diet you are feeding your pet, you veterinarian will calculate the daily calories or daily amount your pet should be fed to achieve this ideal weight gradually over the next 6 month to 1 year.

Your family veterinarian will talk about spreading the daily feeding amount into smaller more frequent meals. We call this a restricted feeding schedule. Leaving food out all day encourages snacking or finishing the entire meal so it is not rationed out for later in the day when your pet becomes hungry again. Learning to feeding restricted meals makes it easier to feed multiple pets different foods or different amounts of food. For multiple pet households, feed your pets in separate rooms or across barriers. Currently I have two kitties Mooky and Roly and so may daily routine consists of waking up in the morning putting out measured amounts of food for Mooky and Roly at separate sides of an kitchen island. Once I am ready to leave for work, if Roly has not finished his meal, but has walked away from his bowl, I will take both food bowls away so that my other cat Mooky does not mow down on calories that do not belong to him. In the evening when I am back from work, I will again re-measure their evening meals for them. Any remainder of food from this morning either gets discarded so I start fresh or used in the calculation of their evening meal.

Learning a restricted feeding technique for any pet who is underweight, overweight or even at their ideal weight will make you better caregivers. This is because it will help you to monitor how much your pet is eating throughout the day and if they are not eating as well because there is still food in the bowl, it may alert you to bring this to the attention of your veterinarian.

The next part of your at-home weight management program is to trend or track their progress at home. This is simple and easy to do. To help trend weight progress at home, you can weigh your pet ONCE a month by weighing yourself while holding your pet over a weight scale and then subtract your weight. You can purchase a pretty calendar just for your pet and record this weight value on this calendar when you weight him or her once a month. The idea is to see a gradual decreasing trend over the next 6 months to a year. If you are finding there is no change or there is an increase in weight or if your pet is already an underweight pet and they are losing more weight, contact your family veterinarian for guidance and professional advice.

If you have any questions or concerns , speak to your family veterinarian. If you would like to schedule a phone consult with me regarding this topic, please visit the Toronto Mobile Veterinary Services website at www.tomobilevet.com and book online.