Transitioning Your Diabetic Dog's Food

We have talked several times about what to feed your pup, what we haven’t talked about is how to transition from the old food to the new food. Even for those pups with “cast iron” stomachs, making the switch all at once is a bad idea, even more so now that they are diabetic. Before this diagnosis if your pup got a little sick from a fast food change, while it was not optimal, it wasn’t a huge deal. Now, because your pup is Diabetic, it is more of a big deal.

We have chatted many times before that what is important about food for a Diabetic pup is that he/she likes it well enough to eat it twice a day, every day. Being mindful of the fat content on a dry matter basis is also very important. You can refer back to this blog post for more details: https://shoppettest.com/blog/what-do-i-feed-my-diabetic-dog/

Now that you have decided on an appropriate food, how do you transition from one food to the next? The actual transition should take 7-10 days and look something like this.

For the first 2 days, 25% of the food should be the new food and 75% the old food. For days 3 and 4, the food mix will be half and half old and new. Days 5 and 6, 75% of the food in the bowl will be the new food and just 25% will be the old food. Days 7, 8 and beyond will be all new food. If you want to do this slower, say over 10 days, you can do so.

During the week of transition, it would be good to keep your calories the same for your pup’s ideal weight, but if you’re like me and math isn’t your thing, just transition according to weight. Keeping in mind that the calories and weight of the two foods will most likely be different, it’s not going to be exact for the week of transition.

Before you start the transition, I would know how much of the new food is equal to the amount of calories that you will end up feeding once complete. For ease of math-phobic people like me, let’s say that you will end up feeding 100 grams of the new food each meal, this will make our transition in the above scenario easy enough for me.

Let’s say that you want to end up with each meal of the new food being 100 grams (this is just an example you will put the real number into your calculation). So for days 1 & 2 you will feed only 25 grams of the new food and the rest the old food. Days 3 and 4, you will feed 50 grams of the old and 50 grams of the new food (remember this is just an example). For days 5 and 6, you will be feeding 75 grams of the new food and 25 grams of the old food in this example. Now you have come to day 7 and you should be feeding 100% new food. Hopefully your pup is in love with this new food and there are no issues.

Now that you have completed the transition, keep in mind that your BG (Blood Glucose) numbers are going to bounce around until this new food settles in and that can take 2 – 3 weeks in some cases. So above all, be patient! Give it time as the composition of the new food will likely be very different from your last food and your pup’s body needs to get used to the new mix in this food.

Like everything else with this disease, slow and steady is the name of the game, even with a food change.

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Until next time…