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Is Your Dog "Pudgy"? A Weighty Subject
It is often difficult for pet owners to recognize that their pets are in fact overweight and not just well fed and happy. One reason we don't detect obesity in our pets is because of our perception of obesity in ourselves. By human standards, an obese person is someone significantly overweight, not the person who has gone up one size. However, with pets, the term obese is used for pets with any excessive accumulation of fat in the stomach and the waist. An animal that is 15-20% overweight is considered obese. Like humans, an obese animal is not healthy and is highly vulnerable to many types of health problems. Cats are particularly vulnerable to gaining weight by nature of their life styles. The metabolism of an overweight cat can no longer support a healthy heart, joints (40% of older cats have joint problems), liver, lungs or normal blood sugar. Obese cats have less heat intolerance and are often poor candidates for surgery.
Why Pets Gain Weight
Kittens and puppies burn more calories than adults because they are using every last drop of nutrients to build their bodies. As our animals grow older, we must make a concerted effort to make sure they are still getting ample exercise. In the days when animals hunted, a cat in the wild would eat about 12 mice a day if he could catch that many. The good thing about eating on the move is that the cat exerts energy while catching food, keeping the consumption and the burning of calories in balance. However, our dogs and cats don't have to do much to get food. Not much at all. Therefore, they run the risk of consuming more calories than they're burning, which just like in humans, leads to gradual weight gain.
Furthermore, dogs and cats are genetically made to save fat for energy. If we were to study wolves' feeding behavior, we would see that wolves don't eat daily. They don't need to eat daily because their physiology is such that extra nutrients are converted to fat to be used later. In short, we feed our pets too much food. And their bodies just keep storing more and more fat until obesity becomes a reality.
Because we have a tendency to overfeed our pets from when they are puppies and kittens, their bodies will make more fat cells than normal. As a result, young obese pets will not be able to lose weight when they get older because it is not possible for their bodies to get rid of the fat cells. Fat cells can only decrease the amount of fat in them. In short, many pets are fat because of their puppy or kitten hood.
Help Is on the Way
If you decide to commit yourself to making your pet lose weight so that he or she may live a longer happier life, it is best
to adopt a holistic approach to weight loss. You must monitor everything from the amount of exercise, amount of food, to
the amount of treats, snacks and scraps he or she partakes in on a daily basis. Exercise is a must because the more muscle
mass an animal has, the more calories the animal burns while inactive. Why wouldn't we want to burn as many calories as we
can while we sleep?
Everything has to be taken into consideration in order to make weight loss successful. We're not looking for fast weight
loss, because like with humans, fast weight loss does not keep the weight off. It more often than not, comes back. Fast
weight loss and weight gain traumatizes the body. Animals should loose no more than 1-2% of their body weight per week.
For instance, if your dog weighs 50 pounds, 1% is 1/2 pound weekly and 2% means 1 pound weekly.
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