Natures Variety/Fromm/Something else?

[Stacy]

I'm trying to do this analysis myself, but math makes my brain hurt. 

Maggie is currently eating Natures Variety Raw Instinct (beef) at 508 kcal/cup. She could stand to gain a couple pounds so her foster parents were feeding her 4 cups/day. She won't eat quite that much for me, but it's probably upwards of 3 cups/day. 4 cups would be 2032 calories/day. 

Katie is eating from the Fromm 4 Star line which has 395 kcal/cup. To get the same number of calories Maggie would have to eat upwards of 5 cups/day. I can't see convincing her to eat that volume. 

Ideally I would prefer them both to eat the same thing.

I can't see changing Katie to Natures Variety. She only gets 1 1/3 cups of food anyway. I would have to cut her back to 1 cup/day to drop her calorie count, and she would think she's starving. 

I'm also not sure if Natures Variety is the same quality as Fromm. The guy at the "fancy" dog food store made a face when I told him that was what Maggie was eating. 

The other factor is price - though not the primary factor. Natures Variety is $70 for a 20 pound bag. And I'm paying $50 for a 30 pound bag of Fromm. 

So I'm not sure what to do. I could leave them each on a different food. Or I could change them both to something different. It looks like Orijen Original has 449 calories per cup, so split the difference? Or transition Maggie to Fromm assuming that 2000 calories per day is kind of excessive and she doesn't need to gain weight that quickly. 

I'm stumped. But I have 20 pounds of Natures Variety to figure out what to do!

[Nancy, Ned, Clancy, and Charlie]

We feed our couch potato dogs Orijen.  I have sticker shock every couple of weeks!  Orijen is expensive, but every time I think of switching (and once I switched to Acana), I do the math on their portions vs cost.  It is about the same.  Two of my boys eat, will eat, are always looking forward to eating.....   I am a mean mom and simply ignore it, and IF they gain weight, I cut down their portions for a while.  I could add unsalted green beans to make them think they are getting more, but I rarely do.  Nine year old Clancy weighs between 60 and 62 pounds (he was 55 when we adopted him at age two and he was a bit thin). He gets 1 cup twice a day - less than the recommended amount, but he really is a couch potato.  Charlie is four. We adopted him a year and a half ago and he weighed 38 pounds - he was not healthy and had to be encouraged to eat. He no longer needs ANY encouragement, he LOVES food and will steal our third boy's food if it is left out. Charlie's daily serving to maintain his 40-42 pound body is 2/3 cup twice a day.

[Karen, Jasper and Jackdoodle]

I'm glad you mentioned the green bean "diet", Nancy. It really is a good solution for dogs who seem to always want more food but who can't afford to gain weight. That might be something Stacy wants to consider for Katie down the road. 

And thank you for giving some examples of the ways we may need to adjust our dogs feeding amounts up or down from the basic recommendations. They really are all so different. 

[Nancy, Ned, Clancy, and Charlie]

It really is amazing how different each of our dogs are.