Royal Canin Medium Light Weight Care Dry Dog Food11–25 kg adult weight · adult

The vet has mentioned it twice now, and nothing has changed, because cutting an ordinary food leaves her genuinely hungry and following you around the kitchen. Willpower isn't the missing ingredient — volume is.

Fat is cut to 11% while fibre runs high — cellulose and beet pulp add bulk without calories, so a normal-looking bowl carries far less energy and she still feels she's eaten. Protein is held at 27% deliberately: a dog losing weight on a low-protein food loses muscle alongside the fat, which slows her metabolism and makes the weight come back faster than it went. L-carnitine is absent here but the protein-to-calorie ratio does the real work. Expect slow, steady loss — that's what you want. Fibre here reaches 10.3%, the highest in the range, so the bowl looks and feels like a meal.

• Weight Management
• Lean Muscle Support
• Satiety

Ingredients

Dehydrated poultry protein, maize, vegetable fibres, barley, wheat, maize gluten, hydrolysed animal proteins, animal fats, rice, beet pulp, cellulose powder, yeasts and parts thereof, fish oil, minerals, soya oil, fructo-oligo-saccharides, hydrolysed yeast (source of manno-oligo-saccharides), marigold extract (source of lutein). Additives (per kg) — Nutritional additives: Vitamin A 22,500 IU · Vitamin D3 1,000 IU · E1 (Iron) 34 mg · E2 (Iodine) 3.5 mg · E4 (Copper) 11 mg · E5 (Manganese) 45 mg · E6 (Zinc) 135 mg · E8 (Selenium) 0.06 mg. Preservatives. Antioxidants.

Looking after it

Store in a cool, dry place, sealed. Use within six weeks of opening. Weigh her monthly and aim for about 1–2% of body weight a week; faster is neither safer nor more durable. Weigh her food on a kitchen scale rather than scooping — a heaped cup can be 40% more than a level one. Everyone in the house has to be on board, because a diet undone by one person's biltong is a diet that fails. Treats should come out of her daily ration, not on top of it, and carrot sticks work better than you'd think. A dog on this food will pass more, and more often — that's the fibre doing its job, not a problem.