Keeping your dog fit is required of every dog owner. If your dog isn’t fit, it is exposed to conditions like obesity, diabetes, and even depressed immunity. These diseases make living uncomfortable for your dog, which goes against the principles of animal welfare.

Contrary to some views, keeping your dog fit doesn’t demand too much time. There are measures you can take to ensure your dog stays fit. Some of them include:

1. Exercising

Your dog greatly benefits from exercising. Not only does exercising help your dog stay fit, but it also prevents certain diseases associated with low activity like arthritis and obesity.

Also, exercising your dog helps you maintain a healthy bond with it. Your relationship with the dog improves when it regularly spends time with you. This helps you get better results when you train such dogs.

Exercising your dog helps the dog best when it is carried out regularly. The intensity is not as essential as the frequency. Even a 20-minute walk with your dog daily, or 3 times a week, does it better than infrequent exercise sessions.

Also, when correcting overweight in dogs, the best results are gotten from balancing frequent exercises with healthy, low-calorie diets. These diets will ensure the dog loses weight, while the activities help the dog build a good muscle tone.

2. Cutting down daily rations

Cutting your dog’s daily rations is a typical correctional measure. It is usually carried out on overweight dogs to ensure they lose excess fat. However, you must handle the process with care to ensure your dog doesn’t develop hypoglycemia.

While reducing your dog’s weight, you are to pay attention to the dog’s food intake. Before starting the dieting regime, you should note the dog’s total food intake per day. Then, you reduce the intake by a constant percentage until you achieve the required feed intake rate. The process must be gradual, so the dog doesn’t have to adapt suddenly to the new feed intake rate.

As stated above, while correcting overweight in dogs, it is essential to complement the ‘starvation’ with regular exercise to achieve the desired results.

3. Give balanced meals

A good feeding tip for new dog owners and those with relatively healthy dogs is giving balanced meals. A balanced meal supplies all necessary nutrients to the dog to the required degree.

While trying to avoid an overweight condition in your dog, it is essential to feed it with adequate calories that will get it through the day. Insufficient calories lead to glucose metabolism-related illnesses like ketonemia and hypoglycemia. In these disease states, the dog either has low blood glucose or a high concentration of harmful metabolites in the blood.

Also, balanced meals supply a variety of vitamins essential for proper body growth and maintenance. Such vitamins could be incorporated into the feed (indirectly) or given to the dog directly in the form of supplements, which could be tablets or oils.

In maintaining your dog’s fitness, following the various steps highlighted above is essential. You could seek advice from a veterinarian to further guide you on the corrective measures.