The phone went at about nine on a Tuesday morning  one of our long-time clients, and she is genuinely wounded. Her vet has just told her the dog needs to lose two pounds. Two! On a twenty-pound dog that's ten percent of him, which is the sort of number that would ruin anybody's week.

And she's baffled. Truly. She has already cut his dinner back. She measures. She reads labels  she turned the bag around after she learned how. She is doing everything right and the scale is not cooperating, and she wants to know what she's missing.

So I ask her the question I always ask. It is not a clever question. It has never once failed me — and it works best on the phone, because you can hear the exact moment somebody starts doing the math.

"How many biscuits?"

She says two. Confidently. Then she stops, because she's already found a third — the one by the back door, every morning, when he comes in from the yard.

Then she remembers her husband. Her husband has a system. Nobody has ever discussed this system out loud but it involves the jar on the counter and the sound of the garage door.

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

We got to six. It took about ninety seconds of silence and small revisions, and by the end she was laughing and slightly appalled, which is exactly the right reaction.

Here is what six ordinary medium biscuits 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 arrived without a single person in that house deciding to feed him. It arrived because a door opened, or a car pulled in, or he looked up at somebody in a certain way that he has spent four years perfecting.

I teach people to read the bag. And then I want to talk about everything that never comes out of one. Because in fourteen years I have almost never met an overweight dog whose dinner was the problem.

THE TEN PERCENT RULE — AND WHY NOBODY FOLLOWS IT

You may have heard the rule already: treats should be no more than ten percent of your dog's daily calories. It gets repeated in every vet office in America and it is completely correct and almost nobody can actually use it, because it's given as a percentage of a number nobody knows.

So let me 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

Write your dog's number on the treat jar. I'm not joking. That is the single most useful thing you will do with this article.

Now — sit down for this next part.

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

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

Small → about 20 calories

Medium → about 40 calories

Large → about 125 calories

Look at what that does to a twenty-pound dog on a fifty-calorie allowance. The medium one is eighty percent of his entire day's treats — one small brown thing, handed over without looking, costing about four cents and feeling like nothing at all. Two of them and you're over.

And the large one? That single biscuit is two and a half times everything he's allowed for the day. Same box. Same brand. Same word on the label.

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

And a quick word on "kcal," since that's what you'll actually see printed there. There's nothing to convert. Kcal and calories are the same number in food — when your cereal box says 200 calories and the dog's bag says kcal, both of them mean kilocalories, and they always have. Read the two words as interchangeable and you will never once be wrong about food.

What does catch people is the part after the slash. Kcal per treat is the number you want, and you can use it exactly as printed. But that figure is optional — the one companies are actually required to put on the bag is kcal per kilogram, and a kilogram of treats is about two and a quarter pounds of them. So if you glance down and see something like 3,500, don't panic and don't throw the bag away. That is not one biscuit.

Here's the whole workaround, and it's where that kitchen scale earns its keep: divide the kcal-per-kilogram number by 1,000 to get calories per gram, then weigh one treat. Multiply. Done. That is precisely how I know a piece of freeze-dried liver runs about eleven calories, and it takes longer to explain than to do.

And before anybody feels got at  this is not a character flaw, it's arithmetic in the dark. A survey this year found that only 16% of dog owners actually weigh their dog's food. The rest of us are scooping, eyeballing, and handing things over all day long, and then wondering why the number on the vet's scale keeps drifting.

DID YOU KNOW? RAWHIDE AND CHEW TREATS LODGE WHERE THE ESOPHAGUS CAN'T STRETCH

Ask a veterinary surgeon what they pull out of dogs' throats and you'll get a list. Bones lead it. But sitting right behind them in the Merck Veterinary Manual — the reference your vet actually keeps on the shelf  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 in front of the diaphragm.

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

Which is why the size of the last piece of a chew matters far more than anything about the first.

WHERE I STAND — BULLY STICKS

I'll save you the suspense. I don't think dogs should have them at all.

Not "in moderation," not "for special occasions." 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 in a survey of 852 people, fewer than half knew. A bully stick is a dried bull penis. I'd rather tell you plainly than let you find out from somebody at the dog park.

But that isn't my real objection. This is. Researchers at Tufts 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 are objects handed to dogs by children, on living room carpets, and then nobody washes their hands afterward, because it came out of a sealed bag and sealed bags feel clean.

And then there's the end of it. A bully stick doesn't finish in crumbs. It works down to a slick little plug of exactly the wrong size, held by a dog who has invested an hour in it and has strong feelings about surrendering it. There is an entire product category  clamps, holders, safety devices — that exists for no other reason than to solve this one problem. When a treat needs an accessory to stop it hurting your dog, that's the treat telling you something.

One last thing, and it's the detail I can't get over. In that same Tufts survey, 71% of the 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 — which is the whole lesson of reading the bag, wearing a different hat.

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

THE TRANSLATOR — WHAT IT WOULD BE IF YOU ATE IT

Calories are abstract. Everybody nods at them and nobody feels them. So let me put the same numbers a different way. Here's what you're really handing a twenty-pound dog, scaled up to a person eating 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 kind that goes in the Kong "just to smear it," is about two doughnuts.

One hot dog off the barbecue is comfortably a full drive-thru meal, fries included.

Now imagine somebody handed you a burger every time you came in from the garden and you'll have a fairly good picture of what's been happening in a lot of very loving households.

None of this means cheese is evil. I give my dogs cheese. It means the piece should be the size of a pea, not the size of a decision.

SO WHAT DO I ACTUALLY HAND OUT?

Fair question, and I'd be annoyed with me too if I spent this long telling you what to stop doing without telling you what to do instead. Nobody wants to be the person who stops giving their dog treats. I'm certainly not asking you to be.

Here's the whole standard I use, and it's three things: small enough to hand over ten of, short enough on the ingredient panel to read in one breath, and countable. That's it. If a treat clears those three, it can live in my pocket.

The ones I put on our own 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 exactly the point: it buys you enormous cooperation for very little money, calorically speaking.

And the numbers are the reason I'm mentioning them at all. A bag runs about 459 calories across roughly forty pieces — which puts one piece at 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. That is the difference between a dog who thinks you're the most interesting person in the house and a dog who gets one cookie at bedtime, and it costs you exactly the same calories either way.

I'm not going to make any grander claim than that. It's liver, it's small, you can count it, and your dog will work hard for it. For a training treat that's the entire job description.

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

FIVE THINGS THAT ACTUALLY WORK

Here's the good news, and it's better news than you're expecting: you don't have to take anything away from him. You just have to stop letting it arrive by accident.

1. Break it, don't shrink it

A dog counts events, not grams. Snap that biscuit into four and you have just given him four moments of pure joy for the price of one, and he will not notice, complain, or file a grievance. This one trick alone fixes most households.

2. Pay him out of his own bowl

Measure the day's food in the morning, take a handful out, and put it in your pocket. That's your training currency. Every "good boy" for the rest of the day is now free, because it already came out of dinner. Dogs are wonderfully bad at telling the difference between a treat and a piece of kibble that arrived at an exciting moment.

3. Buy the twelve-dollar scale

Remember that 16% figure? A cheap digital kitchen scale ends the guessing in about four seconds a day, and it will quietly correct 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 single meal. It is the least glamorous thing I recommend all year and the one that changes the most.

4. Have the household conversation

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

5. Count the chew — including the ones I sell

A long-lasting chew isn't a snack, it's a meal in a stick, and it has to come off the top of the day like anything else. That's as true of the yak chews on our own 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 a fair question — and I've answered it properly here: https://hotdiggitydogresort.com/blog/yak-chews-antlers-calories

IF YOU ONLY DO ONE THING — THE MORNING JAR

Every morning, put the whole day's treats into one small jar on the counter. That's it. That's the system.

When the jar is empty, the day's treats are done — and nobody has to argue about it, keep a tally, or be the bad guy. The jar is the bad guy. Your husband can't overrule a jar.

My client with the six biscuits went home and did exactly this. She texted me eleven weeks later. Two pounds, gone, and she never once told anybody in that house they couldn't give the dog a cookie. She just moved where the cookies lived.

AND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LEDGER

Everything above is the money going out. The other half of the equation is what he actually burns, and a dog who spends the day asleep on the sofa waiting for you to come home is not burning much of anything.

This is the least sales-y thing I'll say, but a structured day of daycare does more for a dog's 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.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Treats are not free. Write his ten-percent number on the jar, turn the treat bag around for kcal per piece, break biscuits into four, and let the Morning Jar be the bad guy. He doesn't know any of this. He's counting on you to.

WANT THIS EVERY TUESDAY?

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

KEEP READING

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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

You may have heard the rule already: treats should be no more than ten percent of your dog's daily calories. It gets repeated in every vet office in America and it is completely correct and almost nobody can actually use it, because it's given as a percentage of a number nobody knows.

So let me 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

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

Small → about 20 calories

And a quick word on "kcal," since that's what you'll actually see printed there. There's nothing to convert. Kcal and calories are the same number in food — when your cereal box says 200 calories and the dog's bag says kcal, both of them mean kilocalories, and they always have. Read the two words as interchangeable and you will never once be wrong about food.

What does catch people is the part after the slash. Kcal per treat is the number you want, and you can use it exactly as printed. But that figure is optional — the one companies are actually required to put on the bag is kcal per kilogram, and a kilogram of treats is about two and a quarter pounds of them. So if you glance down and see something like 3,500, don't panic and don't throw the bag away. That is not one biscuit.

Here's the whole workaround, and it's where that kitchen scale earns its keep: divide the kcal-per-kilogram number by 1,000 to get calories per gram, then weigh one treat. Multiply. Done. That is precisely how I know a piece of freeze-dried liver runs about eleven calories, and it takes longer to explain than to do.

And before anybody feels got at — this is not a character flaw, it's arithmetic in the dark. A survey this year found that only 16% of dog owners actually weigh their dog's food. The rest of us are scooping, eyeballing, and handing things over all day long, and then wondering why the number on the vet's scale keeps drifting.

Medium → about 40 calories

Large → about 125 calories

Look at what that does to a twenty-pound dog on a fifty-calorie allowance. The medium one is eighty percent of his entire day's treats — one small brown thing, handed over without looking, costing about four cents and feeling like nothing at all. Two of them and you're over.

And the large one? That single biscuit is two and a half times everything he's allowed for the day. Same box. Same brand. Same word on the label.

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

Write your dog's number on the treat jar. I'm not joking. That is the single most useful thing you will do with this article.

Now — sit down for this next part.

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

Calories are abstract. Everybody nods at them and nobody feels them. So let me put the same numbers a different way. Here's what you're really handing a twenty-pound dog, scaled up to a person eating 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 kind that goes in the Kong "just to smear it," is about two doughnuts.

One hot dog off the barbecue is comfortably a full drive-thru meal, fries included.

Now imagine somebody handed you a burger every time you came in from the garden and you'll have a fairly good picture of what's been happening in a lot of very loving households.

None of this means cheese is evil. I give my dogs cheese. It means the piece should be the size of a pea, not the size of a decision.

Fair question, and I'd be annoyed with me too if I spent this long telling you what to stop doing without telling you what to do instead. Nobody wants to be the person who stops giving their dog treats.

Here's the whole standard I use: small enough to hand over ten of, short enough on the ingredient panel to read in one breath, and countable. If a treat clears those three, it can live in my pocket.

The ones I reach for most are Mojos — hand-cut beef liver, freeze-dried, with a little mushroom extract added. A bag runs about 459 calories across roughly forty pieces, which puts one piece at 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 is the difference between a dog who thinks you're the most interesting person in the house and a dog who gets one cookie at bedtime.

A baby carrot is about four calories. Green beans, cucumber, a slice of apple, or a single blueberry can fit the budget too.

Here's the good news: you don't have to take anything away from him. You just have to stop letting it arrive by accident.

1. Break it, don't shrink it. Snap a biscuit into four and you have four moments of joy for the price of one.

2. Pay him out of his own bowl. Measure the day's food in the morning, take a handful out, and put it in your pocket. Every reward is now free because it already came out of dinner.

3. Buy the twelve-dollar scale. A cheap digital kitchen scale ends the guessing in about four seconds a day.

4. Have the household conversation. Everybody in the house has to know the number, or one dog ends up on four diets.

5. Count the chew. A long-lasting chew is a meal in a stick and has to come off the top of the day like anything else.