How Much Should You Actually Feed Your Dog?

Most owners feeding their dog too much are following the instructions carefully. That is the frustrating part. The number on the back of the bag is not wrong exactly — it is a range built for a population, and your dog is not a population.

This is general guidance to help you ask better questions, not a feeding prescription. Individual requirements vary enormously, and any dog with a medical condition, any weight-loss plan, and any giant-breed puppy needs numbers from a vet who has examined the dog. What follows is the framework the rest sits on.

Why the bag overfeeds

Feeding charts have three structural problems, and they all push in the same direction.

They are ranges, and people read the top. A chart that says "10–15 kg: 190–250 g" covers a five-kilogram span. A 10.5 kg dog reading the middle of that range is being fed for a dog half again their size.

They assume an active, intact adult. Energy requirements drop noticeably after neutering — commonly cited in the region of 20–30% — and most pet dogs get considerably less activity than the model dog behind the chart.

Nobody weighs the food. A "cup" measured by eye varies by 20% or more between scoops. Kitchen scales cost less than a bag of food and remove the variable entirely.

None of that makes the manufacturer dishonest. It makes the label a starting point that needs correcting against the dog standing in front of you.

The measure that actually matters: body condition

Weight in kilograms tells you very little on its own. Body condition score — a hands-on assessment used in veterinary practice, usually on a 1–9 scale — tells you whether the weight is right for that individual.

You can do a usable version at home in thirty seconds:

If you need to press to find ribs, the dog is carrying extra. If ribs, spine, and hip bones are visible from across the room, the dog is underweight — and that needs a vet, because sudden weight loss is a symptom before it is a diet outcome.

A useful reference point on the 1–9 scale: each point above ideal (5/9) is generally taken to correspond to roughly 10% over ideal body weight. A dog at 7/9 is carrying about 20% extra — on a 20 kg dog, four kilograms.

This matters more than it sounds. Surveys across the UK, US, and Australia have repeatedly put the proportion of overweight or obese dogs at or above half the population, and the long-running research on the subject found that dogs kept lean lived meaningfully longer than their littermates fed more generously — years, not months, and with later onset of joint disease. Weight is not cosmetic.

Two caveats. Very heavy-coated breeds hide condition, so go by hands rather than eyes. And extreme body shapes — sighthounds are naturally lean, bulldogs are naturally broad — do not read cleanly on a standard chart. Ask your vet what ideal looks like for your specific dog.

Where to start, and how to adjust

Since you should not take a number from an article, take a method instead:

1. Feed for the ideal weight, not the current one. If your 24 kg Labrador should be 20 kg, the starting portion is the one for 20 kg.
2. Start at the low end of the range unless your dog is a working dog, a growing puppy, or visibly underweight.
3. Weigh the food. Grams, on scales, every meal, for at least the first month.
4. Reassess every two weeks using body condition, not the scale alone — muscle and fat weigh differently and the hands-on check catches what a number misses.
5. Adjust in small steps. Around 10% up or down, then wait another two weeks. Large swings make it impossible to tell what worked.

If your dog needs to lose weight rather than simply stop gaining, stop here and book a vet appointment. Weight-loss feeding needs a calculated target, a rate of loss that is safe, and a check for underlying causes such as thyroid disease. Restricting food on your own guesswork risks nutrient deficiency and misses the diagnosis.

Treats, training, and the 10% rule

Here is the single most useful number in this article: treats and chews should be no more than about 10% of daily calories, and that 10% comes out of the daily allowance — not on top of it.

Training-related weight gain is almost never caused by bad food. It is caused by good training. You run three short sessions a day, twenty repetitions each, and sixty treats disappear before dinner. Nobody subtracts them.

The fix is mechanical, not disciplinary:

• Measure the whole day in the morning. Weigh the full daily portion into a container. Training treats come out of that container. When it is empty, the day is done.
• Train with part of the meal. Kibble works fine as a reward for easy repetitions in a quiet room. Save the good stuff for hard environments.
• Use pea-sized soft treats for reps. Soft matters because chewing breaks rhythm — a dog crunching for eight seconds has lost the thread. Small matters because a session should be limited by your dog's attention, not their stomach. A treat the size of your little fingernail is plenty.
• Cut biscuits down. Most commercial training treats are two to four times larger than they need to be. Quartering them costs nothing and quadruples your reps.
• Count the chews. A single dental stick or a chunk of cheese can be a significant share of a small dog's day. On a 5 kg dog, the margin is tiny.

This is exactly why short sessions work better anyway. Five to ten focused minutes, one lesson a day, ending on a win — that is the pattern used throughout the week-by-week puppy schedule, and it keeps the treat budget honest as a side effect. If you would rather not spend calories at all on marking behaviour, clicker training lets the click carry the information and the food follow less often.

Non-food rewards count too and cost nothing: a ten-second tug, a thrown toy, or genuine praise are all currency with most dogs. Find out what yours will work for.

Meal frequency by age

Frequency matters less than total intake, but it matters for young puppies and for deep-chested breeds.

Large and giant breeds mature later — many are still growing at 18 months and should stay on a growth-appropriate diet until then. Giant-breed puppies are a genuine exception to everything here: calcium and energy intake during growth affect skeletal development, and getting it wrong contributes to orthopaedic disease. That plan comes from your vet, not from a chart.

One more thing worth knowing: in deep-chested breeds, bloat and gastric torsion is a real emergency risk, and a single enormous daily meal is often listed among the things to avoid. Splitting food across two meals is the cautious default.

Transitions take a week

Switching food abruptly is the most common cause of avoidable diarrhoea. The gut microbiome adapts, but not overnight.

Slow it down if you see loose stools — hold at the current ratio for a few extra days rather than pushing forward. Dogs with sensitive stomachs or diagnosed GI conditions should transition over two weeks or more, and on veterinary advice.

Logging what changed and when is genuinely useful here, because "the food changed on Tuesday" is exactly the detail people forget by the time they are in the vet's consulting room. Paw Plan has a Journal for nutrition and health entries with a statistics view, but a notebook works just as well. What matters is that the record exists.

Human foods that are genuinely dangerous

Most "toxic foods" lists are padded. These are the ones that matter, and none of them are negotiable.

If your dog eats any of these, call your vet or an animal poison line immediately — do not wait for symptoms and do not try to induce vomiting on your own. Timing is the variable that changes outcomes, and this article deliberately gives no doses or thresholds because those decisions belong to someone with the dog's weight and history in front of them.

Cooked bones are worth a separate mention: they splinter, and they cause perforations and obstructions.

The short version

• The bag is a starting point, not an instruction
• Body condition — ribs by feel, waist from above — is the real measure
• Treats are 10% of the day's food, taken out of the bowl
• Pea-sized and soft for training reps; more reps, same calories
• Transition food over seven days
• Reassess every two weeks, adjust by about 10% at a time

And the part that bears repeating: this is general guidance. Metabolism, neuter status, breed, age, and health conditions all move the numbers, sometimes a lot. A dog losing or gaining weight without a change in feeding, a puppy of a giant breed, an older dog, or any dog on medication should be fed to a plan made by a vet. An article cannot examine your dog. That is not a disclaimer — it is the most useful sentence here.