We took Sidney and Butters to the vet last week for some shots they needed and weighed them both. Butters weighed 59 pounds (she is 15 months old) and Sidney was down to 43 pounds (he is 4 1/2 years old). At one point Sidney weighed 55 pounds. This was of course before we brought Butters into our home.
While we exercised Sidney as much as we could - he gets way more exercise playing with Butters and has dropped around 12 pounds over the past year. I don't attribute this to MegaE really, the current drop at least, just burning way more calories that he used to.
Sidney doesn't look super skinny, in fact at 55 pounds he was considered overweight for his size. So we now need to get more calories into his diet. My concern with adding larger portions that is more than the 1 cup of Eukanuba Large Breed Dog Food he gets blended with 2 cups of water is the volume being so much. Plus, we do not want to change his diet drastically, since our MegaE food and eating routine is working.
So we are going back to the strategy that we had when he was a puppy and we were concerned with cramming calories into his food. We are going to add a tablespoon scoop of the Eukanuba Puppy Weaning Formula to each meal and blend it with his food to add calories that are healthy, but not add volume to his meals. Hopefully this will work, we may add two tablespoons if we think he needs more, but for now we will start with 2 meals:
1 Cup Eukanuba Large Breed Dog Food (Labrador)
1 Tablespoon scoop Eukanuba Puppy Weaning Formula
2 Cups Water
Blended to a milkshake consistency
30 Minutes sit time in his Bailey Chair
Our dog Wyatt is a 12yo lab with megaE. He was recently diagnosed in May of this year, he has had larpar for some time but only started experiencing problems in January of 2014. He is on Metoclopramide, Prilosec OTC and supplemental probiotics. We have been successful in bringing him down to regurgitating his food from 10+ more times per day, to some days once or twice. Like many dogs with MegaE he has his good and bad days. We are now working towards bringing his weight back up. He is 65lbs and really should be 72 at his age and activity level. In his prime, he was a healthy 80lbs when he was very active. I am curious did you notice a decrease in Sidney's regurgitation when you started blending her food? Also, does she ever develop a distaste for her food? Wyatt who has never been finicky, has recently started turning his nose up to food after about 10 days or so. So to keep him eating, we switch flavors/brands. We've been going back and forth between canned Nutro and canned Ideal Balance and supplementing with some sweet potato and pumpkin which seem to really help calm his belly. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!!
ReplyDeleteHi Dana - Luckily Sidney has been OK with his food - when he turns it away, there is usually something wrong - but that has been some time ago. It is probably easier for us since Sid has Congenital MegaE(born with it) and Wyatt has Acquired MegaE. Our feeding has been the same since Sid was 10 weeks old - so I would gather to guess that with Wyatt - this is so new that you have to keep experimenting with the food until you get something he loves - we always blended - I know some people do the meatball type - that rolls whole down into the tummy - we haven't tried that. If you are on Facebook, there is a MegaE group that should have lots of people with Acquired MegaE dogs that could have some experience with trial and error on feeding and the situation of a dog getting Megaesophagus later in life.
DeleteLet me know if this helps at all