Our dogs have always been relatively healthy, Zorro’s ideopathic epilepsy aside, but when her senior dog checkup showed that Miss Cleo had some fatty cysts, and needed to lose five pounds (which is a LOT for a dog her size) I went into doggy diet-guru mode.

I didn’t buy her lipovox or anything, though from what I read about the stuff, I might try it myself. I did, however, buy her some all natural crunchy dog food, with no wheat or corn. Instead it’s made from potatoes and meat – the flavor we tried first was sweet potato and duck, and yes, I know duck is fatty, but this is actually less so than the rolled food from the same company (the Dick Van Patten stuff) they’ve been eating ever since Zorro began to refuse the raw meat diet.

Surprisingly, Zorro, who is rapidly running low on teeth, likes the crunchy stuff too – it’s a small bites blend – which pleases us, because feeding them separate stuff is really difficult.