It was about nine on a Tuesday when the phone rang — one of our regulars, and she sounded like she'd been punched. The vet had just said her dog needed to lose two pounds. Two. On a twenty-pound dog that's ten percent of him, and that is the kind of news that ruins a week.

And she couldn't make sense of it. She'd already cut dinner. She measures. She turns the bag around now — she learned that from us. She's doing the responsible things, and the scale still won't move, and she wants to know what she's missing.

So I ask the question I always ask. It isn't clever. It has never once failed me — and on the phone you can hear the second somebody starts adding in their head.

"How many biscuits?"

Two, she says, sure of it. Then she goes quiet, because a third has already shown up — the one by the back door every morning when he comes in from the yard.

Then her husband. He has a system. Nobody has ever said the system out loud, but it involves the jar on the counter and the garage door.

Then bedtime. Then the one for coming when called, which she'd never counted because that one isn't a treat — that one is training.

We landed on six. Roughly ninety seconds of silence and little corrections, and by the end she was laughing and slightly horrified, which is exactly the right place to land.

And so I told her what six ordinary medium biscuits actually cost that dog:

Just about half of everything he's allowed to eat that day.

Not half his treats. Half his day. Nearly half of that dog's food showed up without anybody in the house deciding to feed him — because a door opened, or a car came home, or he looked at somebody the way he's practiced for four years.

I teach people to read the bag. What I want next is everything that never comes out of one. In fourteen years, dinner almost never turns out to be why an overweight dog is overweight.

You've likely heard it already: keep treats to ten percent of his daily calories or less. Every clinic repeats it, and they're right — and almost nobody can use it, because it's a percentage of a number nobody knows.

So I'll just hand you the number. Roughly, for an average adult dog who gets a normal amount of exercise:

20 lb dog → about 500 calories a day → 50 for treats

50 lb dog → about 1,050 a day → 105 for treats

80 lb dog → about 1,500 a day → 150 for treats

Put your dog's number on the treat jar in marker. I'm not kidding. That may be the single most useful thing you do with this article.

Now — sit with this next bit.

Look at what that does to a twenty-pound dog with a fifty-calorie treat budget. One medium takes eighty percent of his entire day's treats — one little brown thing, handed over without looking, costing about four cents and feeling like nothing. Two of them and you're over.

And the large? That one biscuit is two and a half times everything he's a

Here's the workaround, and it's where a kitchen scale earns its keep: divide kcal-per-kilogram by 1,000 to get calories per gram, weigh one treat, multiply. Done. That's exactly how I know a piece of freeze-dried liver runs about eleven calories, and explaining it takes longer than doing it.

And before anybody feels got at — this isn't a character flaw, it's math in the dark. A survey this year found that only 16% of dog owners actually weigh their dog's food. The rest of us scoop, eyeball, and hand things over all day, and then wonder why the vet's scale keeps drifting.llowed for the day. Same box. Same brand. Same word on the label.

Which brings me to the real skill, and it's the same one from reading the food bag: turn the treat bag around too. Treat packages print a calorie statement just like food bags do, in small type near the guaranteed analysis. Don't trust my number for your treats. Go find yours.

And a quick word on "kcal," because that's what the bag will say. There's nothing to convert. In food, kcal and calories are the same number — your cereal box says 200 calories, the dog bag says kcal, and both mean kilocalories. Always have. Treat those two words as the same and you won't go wrong on food.

What trips people up is the part after the slash. Kcal per treat is the number you want, and you can use it as printed. But that figure is optional — what companies must put on the bag is kcal per kilogram, and a kilogram of treats is about two and a quarter pounds. So if you glance down and see something like 3,500, don't panic and don't toss the bag. That is not one biscuit.

First, an honest correction to how everybody talks about this, me included. There is no such thing as "a biscuit." The word covers a scrap the size of your thumbnail and a slab you could prop a door with, and the calorie gap between them is not small.

So let's use the box that's actually sitting in most American kitchens. A plain Milk-Bone Original, right off the shelf:

Small → about 20 calories

Medium → about 40 calories

Large → about 125 calories

Ask a veterinary surgeon what they pull from dogs' throats and you'll get a list. Bones lead. But sitting right behind them in the Merck Veterinary Manual — the book your vet actually keeps — are rawhide and chew treats.

They lodge in the three places the esophagus can't stretch: the thoracic inlet, the stretch over the heart, and just ahead of the diaphragm.

And here's what almost nobody hears, because the story usually stops at the rescue. Getting it out is often the easier half. The most common complication afterward is a stricture — scar tissue that permanently narrows the esophagus, so swallowing stays a problem for the rest of that dog's life.

And so the size of the last piece of a chew matters far more than anything about the first.

I'll spare you the buildup. Dogs shouldn't have them — that's where I land.

Not "in moderation," not "for birthdays." We don't stock them, we don't feed them, and I'd rather you heard my reasons than my hedging.

Start with what one is, because when researchers surveyed 852 people, fewer than half could say. A bully stick is a dried bull penis. I'd rather tell you straight than let you learn it from somebody at the dog park.

But that isn't my real objection. This is. A Tufts team bought 26 of them off ordinary store shelves and cultured what was living on them. Seven — better than one in four — carried E. coli. One carried MRSA. One carried C. difficile. Twenty-six is a small sample and I'll say so, but these get handed to dogs by children, on living-room carpets, and then nobody washes their hands, because a sealed bag feels clean.

And then there's the ending. A bully stick doesn't finish as crumbs. It works down to a slick little plug of exactly the wrong size, held by a dog who put an hour into it and has strong feelings about giving it up. There's an entire product category — clamps, holders, safety gadgets — that exists only to solve this one problem. When a treat needs an accessory so it doesn't hurt your dog, the treat is telling you something.

One last thing, and it's the detail that sticks with me. In that same Tufts survey, 71% of people handing out bully sticks said they deliberately avoid by-products in their dog's food. A bully stick is a by-product. It simply doesn't read like one, because it arrives in its own package instead of on an ingredient panel — the whole lesson of reading the bag, in a different hat.

He will work for a piece of kibble. He has never once asked what it cost.

Calories stay abstract. People nod and nobody feels them. So let me translate the same numbers. Here's what you're really handing a twenty-pound dog, scaled to a person on a normal day's food:

One ounce of cheddar — about the little cube you use to hide a pill — is roughly a whole fast-food burger to him.

One tablespoon of peanut butter, the smear that goes in the Kong "just because," is about two doughnuts.

One hot dog off the grill lands somewhere near a full drive-thru meal, fries included.

Now picture somebody handing you a burger every time you came in from the garden, and you'll have a fair picture of what's been happening in a lot of very loving houses.

None of this means cheese is evil. I give my dogs cheese. It just means the piece should be pea-sized — not decision-sized.

Fair question. I'd be annoyed with me too if I spent this long on what to stop without saying what to reach for instead. Nobody wants to quit treating their dog. I'm certainly not asking you to.

My bar is three things: small enough that I can hand over ten, short enough on the ingredient panel to read in one breath, and countable. Clear those three and it can live in my pocket.

What I put on our shelf and reach for most are Mojos — hand-cut beef liver, freeze-dried, with a little mushroom extract added. Dogs lose their minds over liver, and that's the point: enormous cooperation for very little money, calorically speaking.

And the numbers are why I'm mentioning them. A bag runs about 459 calories across roughly forty pieces — so one piece is about eleven calories.

A 20 lb dog's 50-calorie day buys him:

Barely one medium biscuit

— or —

Four pieces of freeze-dried liver

Four rewards instead of one. A fifty-pound dog gets nine. Same calories either way — the difference is a dog who thinks you're the most interesting person in the house versus a dog who gets one cookie at bedtime.

I'm not going to dress that up. Liver, small, countable, and he'll work hard for it. For a training treat that's the whole job.

And the free ones, because not everything has to come from a bag. A baby carrot is about four calories. Green beans, cucumber, a slice of apple, a single blueberry — most dogs go for all of them, and there's decent research suggesting dogs who get real vegetables a couple of times a week come out ahead. Twelve carrot sticks still fit inside that fifty-calorie budget, which ought to tell you something.

Here's the good news, and it's better than you think: you don't have to take anything away. You only have to stop the accidental arrivals.

Dogs count moments, not grams. Snap that biscuit into four and you've handed him four little wins for the price of one — and he will not notice, complain, or file a grievance. That single habit fixes most households by itself.

In the morning, measure the day's food, pull a handful into your pocket, and that's your training money. Every "good boy" after that is free, because it already came out of dinner. Dogs are wonderfully bad at telling a treat from a piece of kibble that showed up at an exciting moment.

Remember that 16% figure? A cheap digital kitchen scale ends the guessing in about four seconds a day, and it quietly fixes an error most people have been making for years — because a "cup" scooped from a deep bag is not the same cup twice, and the difference compounds every meal. Least glamorous tip I give all year, and the one that changes the most.

This one's awkward, and it's the one that matters. The whole house has to know the number. Otherwise you're on a diet and he's on four of them, and the person with the garage-door habit genuinely does not think he's doing anything.

A long-lasting chew isn't a snack. It's a meal in a stick, and it comes off the top of the day like everything else. That's as true of the yak chews on our shelf — which we do stock, and which I do like — as of anything else in the store. If you're wondering why one chew gets a flat no from me and another gets shelf space, that's fair — and I've answered it properly here: https://hotdiggitydogresort.com/blog/yak-chews-antlers-calories

Each morning, load the whole day's treats into one small jar on the counter. That is the whole system.

Empty jar means treats are done — no argument, no tally, nobody has to play bad guy. The jar plays bad guy. Your husband can't overrule a jar.

The client with the six biscuits went home and did exactly that. Eleven weeks later she texted: two pounds gone, and she never once told anybody in the house they couldn't give him a cookie. She just changed where the cookies lived.

Everything above is calories going out. The other half is what he burns, and a dog who sleeps on the sofa all day waiting for you is not burning much.

I'll say the least sales-y thing I can: a structured daycare day often does more for a waistline than any amount of measuring — because it's play, and play doesn't feel like a diet to anybody involved. Watch him on the webcam some afternoon. He is not conserving energy.

Treats aren't free. Put his ten-percent number on the jar, flip the treat bag for kcal per piece, break biscuits into four, and let the Morning Jar be the enforcer. He doesn't know any of this. He's counting on you to.

This started as Wagging Weekly — the note I send our clients every Tuesday on feeding, behavior, grooming, and canine health. No filler. Free. Subscribe: https://mailchi.mp/hotdiggitydogresort/sign-up

How to Read a Dog Food Label — the ten-second method: https://hotdiggitydogresort.com/blog/how-to-read-a-dog-food-label

Yak Chews, Antlers, and the calorie number that made me sit down: https://hotdiggitydogresort.com/blog/yak-chews-antlers-calories

Canine Food and Diet Types: https://hotdiggitydogresort.com/blog/canine-food-and-diet

David DiLoreto is Certified in Pet Nutrition and co-owner of Hot Diggity Dog Resort in Escondido, California, which he has run for fourteen years alongside his wife Penny — Master Groomer and Certified Animal Behaviorist. He is the author of The Long-Life Dog. Hot Diggity Dog Resort holds a 4.9-star rating on Google and was voted Escondido's Best Pet Groomer in 2025.

Book: https://a.co/d/04l5ZqUH

This article is educational and is not a substitute for veterinary advice. Talk with your veterinarian about your individual dog's dietary needs, particularly if he has a diagnosed medical condition or is on a weight-loss plan.