How to properly change your dog's food

How to properly change your dog's food

As my dog started to grow and we said bye to the puppy phase and welcomed the full-of-energy and rebelious adolescence phase and slowly starting the adult phase, I needed to change her diet to properly adjust to her age and growth requirements.

If you are using kibble, like me then you most probably know what at some point of time your dog might lose interest on puppy’s kibble or you might have just simply thought, well let’s just look at adult food now. Doesn’t matter when, you eventually need to change your dog’s food.

Quickly or suddendly changing your dog’s food may cause your dog to have an upset belly and may have diarrhea. So to prevent that you need to phase in the new food and phase out the old one. Depending on your dog you may need more time or less, but it’s always good to know how your dog handles food transitions.

My Maya has a rather sensible belly, so she has to go through a week of food transition for her not to have any noticeable change.

The overall process is super simple and it goes like this:

start=>start: Old food: 100%
stage1=>operation: Old food: 90%, New food: 10%
stage2=>operation: Old food: 75%, New food: 25%
stage3=>operation: Old food: 50%, New food: 50%
stage4=>operation: Old food: 25%, New food: 75%
stage5=>operation: Old food: 10%, New food: 90%
end=>end: New food: 100%

start->stage1->stage2->stage3->stage4->end

So how long should I stay at each stage? Well, that depends on your dog! I usually recommend staying at each stage 2 days but you if your dog is very sensible or picky at the new food, then maybe think about doing it slower, e.g., 3 days at each stage.

It does take some time, so have some patience.