By Carrie Hyde | March 1, 2021

Feeding a Species Appropriate diet is one of the best choices you can make for your pet. However, it can be overwhelming for new pet owners or someone making the switch from kibble. There are so many rabbit holes you can go down when learning all about your pet’s nutritional needs. These ” rabbit holes” can help but also bring about fear and misinformation. People fear they won’t have a balanced diet, it will be too expensive, how will they find all the organ meats? How much should they feed? When they should feed? All this confusion can be stressful, not just for you but your pet as well. As a pet nutritionist, I have personally witnessed people be scared into going back to a processed food diet. So here is a little something to help ease some of that fear. Don’t think of balance as a day-to-day thing, but rather as over a week or a month. If your pet does a good rotation of foods. And you provide the basics, organ meat, (protein) fiber, fat, along with some calcium sources your pet will be eating healthy. Fasting an adult dog is also important and I personally fast my adult dogs at least twice a month, as well as a liquid goat’s milk fast once a week. Some days I only feed green Juju which is a mixture of pureed veggies soaked in bone broth. As far as cost, there are a lot of ways to save money. I use a commercial diet mostly but I enhance with things from my fridge.

Here is a little diet I like to call the S.A.S.i.H.i.F Species Appropriate Stuff I have in Fridge. Stop throwing away food you may not want. Blueberries for example, are kind of gross to me when they get a little mushy, so these will find their way into my dogs dinner or the stems of broccoli, these provide some good fiber for your pets. I use a lot of eggs in my pet’s diet and they are very inexpensive. and the shells can be a source of calcium And I almost never get through a whole watermelon before it gets mushy, “hey Ansel want some watermelon? By thinking differently, AND training my husband to keep a bowl in the fridge of stuff he may not want or use, I create diets for my dogs, I rotate, fast and monitor, rotate, fast and monitor, rotate, fast and monitor and have been doing this and teaching this for over 15 years. Feeding your pets should not be more complicated than feeding yourself or your children, and it’s not.