What’s your dog’s ideal weight?

Is your dog underweight?

If you can easily feel your dogs ribs and hip bones, your dog may be underweight. Look from above though for the easiest tell. Do the top of the hip bones and bottom of rib cage jut out visibly? (If your pup is extra fluffy, it’s easier to tell when they’re wet after a bath, or simply by feeling).

If your dog is underweight, you’ll want to increase their portions slightly (and slowly!). If your dog eats fresh food from NomNomNow, simply let us know and we’ll choose an appropriate target weight to put into our algorithm to healthily increase portions.

Is your dog the ideal weight?

The easiest way to tell if your dog is the ideal weight is by looking at the definitions of an overweight and underweight dog, and ruling out that your dog is neither. A dog at a healthy weight has a soft outline of their rib cage, and their belly tucks up between their ribs and hind legs.

Is your dog overweight?

As much as none of us want to admit that our dogs may have a little extra to love, more than half of dogs in the US are overweight– so statistically speaking, this category applies to the majority of our four-legged friends!

An overweight dog will be lacking the noticeable belly tuck that ideal and underweight dogs have. When looking at your dog from above, you may notice a bulge outward between the rib cage and hips (this should gently curve inward on a healthy dog). When feeling the ribs, you’ll notice thicker padding on them.

As much as we love feeding our pups, their being overweight puts them at a higher risk for life-threatening diseases, joint issues, lower energy levels (which means less play-time together!), and a lower quality of life. The best thing to do is to notice when our dogs fit in this overweight category and take steps to gradually reduce portion sizes (and stick to them, even when those begging puppy eyes tempt us otherwise!)

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