Feeding Your Puppy: Switching Food, Portions and Meal Rhythm

Slowly — and only with a reason. If your puppy tolerates the breeder's food well, has a shiny coat, formed stools and steady growth, there is no obligation to change. Reasons would be: poor tolerance, questionable declaration, or the variety simply being hard for you to source long-term.

The switch itself follows the seven-day staircase: for the first two days mix a quarter new food into three quarters old, then half and half, then three quarters new, fully switched from day seven. For sensitive stomachs, stretch each step to three days. Soft stools during the switch are normal; diarrhoea means one step back.

How to recognise good puppy food: it is declared a complete food for puppies or “growth” — meaning it covers the full nutritional needs of growth under the FEDIAF nutritional guidelines, including the critical calcium-phosphorus ratio. Marketing vocabulary like “grain-free” or “like the wolf” says nothing about that.

As a starting value: the manufacturer's feeding table for the breed's TARGET weight and current age — not for the current weight alone. These tables are averages; your individual dog may sit ten or twenty per cent above or below.

Calibration therefore happens on the body, not the measuring cup: ribs should be palpable under light pressure like pencils under a towel, a waist visible from above, the belly line tucked from the side. A chubby puppy isn't “thriving” — it's a risk: excess weight during growth loads joints in their most vulnerable phase and programmes fat cells for life.

Weigh weekly at the same time and track the curve — the feeding calculator on this site helps with reference values. Steady is the goal: in large breeds, overly fast growth is explicitly undesirable, even though “filling out nicely” sounds like health.

At four to five months, three meals is the usual rhythm — morning, midday, evening, at fixed times. Fixed times stabilise digestion, make toilet times plannable, and double as a checkpoint where appetite serves as a health indicator.

The move to two meals usually comes around month six, when portions for three meals become impractically small. There is no fixed date: a dog still eating three times at seven months is doing nothing wrong. In very small breeds, smaller, more frequent meals often stay sensible for longer.

After eating, rest applies — no romping, no training, no wild garden lap. That aids digestion in all dogs and, in large deep-chested breeds, is a precaution to take seriously against life-threatening gastric torsion.

Raw feeding and home-cooked rations during growth are precision work: calcium, phosphorus, vitamin D and energy must stay in the right ratio for months, and errors only show once they've reached the skeleton. If you want this route, have the ration calculated by a veterinary nutrition specialist — “recipe from a forum” is not an option for a puppy. Raw feeding also has hygiene rules; keyword Aujeszky's disease: never raw pork.

If your puppy eats poorly, audit the maths first: usually the appetite isn't too small, the side-calories are too big — a puppy collecting chews and treats all day isn't hungry at dinner. Add teething phases where chewing hurts (soaked food helps), and plain hot days.

Poor eating becomes a vet case with accompanying symptoms: a puppy that is listless, vomits, has diarrhoea or eats practically nothing for more than a day gets seen — puppies have no reserves for long experiments. And a word on pickiness: whoever answers refusal with something more exciting is training a gourmet. Bowl down, removed without comment after twenty minutes, next meal as normal — healthy dogs don't voluntarily starve.