How Much Should You Actually Feed Your Dog?

I spent years second-guessing Pippi's portions. Too much and she would gain, too little and she would be begging within an hour of her bowl being empty. The feeding chart on the bag said one thing, the vet said another, and the internet said seventeen different things at the same time.

Here is the thing I wish somebody had just told me. The feeding chart on the bag is almost always wrong for your specific dog. Not because the brand is lying, but because that chart is built for an average dog that does not exist. It does not know your dog is fixed. It does not know if they sleep all day or run at the park for an hour. It does not know if they are a food-motivated Boston Terrier or a picky poodle mix.

Why the bag is wrong

Bag feeding charts err on the generous side. Partly because a dog that looks well fed is good for the brand, and partly because the math favors selling more food. If every bag told you to feed 20% less, they would sell 20% less food. Do the math.

The charts also ignore almost everything that actually matters. Activity level, life stage, whether your dog is spayed or neutered, their current weight versus their ideal weight, breed tendencies. A ten pound Boston Terrier and a ten pound Jack Russell do not burn the same calories in a day. One of them is a couch potato. The other is a perpetual motion machine.

There is a real formula. Nobody uses it.

Vets have an actual formula for daily calories. It involves exponents and a calculator and at least three multipliers depending on whether your dog is fixed, working, growing, or losing weight. You can google it if you really want to. I never bother. It is the kind of thing that sounds simple until you are sitting at the kitchen counter with a notepad wondering if you are doing it right.

What you actually want is somebody else to do the math.

The free calculator that just does it for you

JustFoodForDogs put out a free calculator that does this. You plug in weight, age, activity, and your dog's ideal weight if you are trying to lean them out. It hands you back a calorie target. No signup, no email gate.

I went into it expecting a number skewed toward selling their food. It is not. It just gives you calories, and that number is useful no matter what brand or style you feed. You take the target and divide it into your bag's calorie-per-cup, or your freeze dried bag's calorie-per-ounce, and now you know your portion.

Here is the JustFoodForDogs Dog Food Calculator. It is the easiest free tool I have found for this.

Once you have the calorie number, the food is up to you

This is the part where pet people get loud on the internet. Raw, kibble, fresh cooked, freeze dried, home cooked. Everyone has a strong opinion. The truth is most quality options will work fine for most dogs as long as the calories and the nutritional balance are right.

If you are sticking with kibble, keep using kibble but weigh the portions. A fifteen dollar kitchen scale will save you from the measuring cup guesswork that has no business being called measuring. Calories per cup varies wildly between brands, so use the bag's calorie number, not the cup recommendation.

If you have been kibble-curious about fresh food, the two main JustFoodForDogs lines are worth looking at. Fresh Frozen is their main offering, human grade ingredients, vet formulated, shipped frozen on a subscription. Pantry Fresh is the same recipes but shelf stable in pouches, which is what you want for travel or as a backup. JFFD is one of the more reputable brands in the fresh food space and they have recipes sized for every kind of dog.

If you do order, heads up they run 50% off the first autoship. Worth knowing before you commit. Here is the autoship offer.

If you are raw or freeze dried curious, that is a longer conversation and we have a whole raw feeding section for it. Whatever you land on, the calorie target from the calculator still applies. Calories are calories.

When to rerun the numbers

Your dog's number is not a one time thing. Rerun it any time one of these changes.

• •Puppy to adult, or adult to senior
• •Any 10% or more change in weight, up or down
• •Spay or neuter (metabolism drops noticeably)
• •Big activity level change, like going from one walk a day to hiking on weekends
• •New diagnosis that affects metabolism, talk to your vet first

I run the calculator on Pippi about twice a year. Takes two minutes. Way better than staring at the bag wondering if I am overfeeding her again.