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Veterinarian Scales and Your Pet’s Health

Veterinarian Scales and Your Pet’s Health

Maintaining a healthy weight for your beloved family pet is important for sustaining their quality of life. In dogs alone, obesity affects 25% of the canine population in the United States. This is a staggering number that pet owners should be concerned about. There are ways to lose this extra weight and keep it off.

Having your pet’s weight checked by a professional is very important in determining their overall health. Like their owners, too much weight causes health issues like heart disease, diabetes and arthritis. Typically, Veterinarians that are dealing with obesity management of an animal will recommend one or more options. They may either prescribe a diet high fiber or reduce the amount of calories that are eaten in a day. Another way to manage your pet’s weight is through proper exercise. Take your dog on regular walks and if you have a treadmill in your home, don’t hesitate to train your pet on how to safely walk on it to shave away those unwanted pounds.

At your well visit, the Veterinarian can tell if your pet is overweight by weighing them. The scales they use have really come a long way. Now, most scales have low profile platforms that make is easy for pets to step up onto the weighing platform in order to get an accurate weight check. In addition, many scales have motion sensing technology and lock-in weight feature that gives you accurate weighing results even if the animal is moving during the weighing process.

One of the most popular scales used by Veterinarians is the Health O Meter 2842KL Platform Scale. This scale has a removable rubber mat for the comfort and safety of your pet and for ease of cleaning. It has a remote display that can be mounted to any wall or table top and has an accuracy of .2 pounds. The majority of Veterinarian’s scales today are fabricated so that they can be easily cleaned. For large scales, aluminum is best as it will not rust when washed with water. And, because it’s made of aluminum, it lighter in weight and is made to be portable. A standard Veterinarian scale should have the capacity of 500 pounds and be able to weigh even the largest dog. For smaller pets such as birds and small reptiles, a scale with greater accuracy is recommended.

Some recommended tips for keeping your family pet healthy their entire life is to have a yearly well visit with your Veterinarian. Be sure to bring up any concerns about their health or behavior. Make sure your pet gets plenty of exercise. Choose a brand of food that includes a good balance of fiber and nutrition and try to minimize the unhealthy table scraps.

Untreated obesity can be a devastating condition for your pet and instituting an obesity-management program may add quality years to your pet’s life. Be sure to include a yearly well visit to keep your pet in good physical shape.

Follow Recipes with the Right Tools

Follow Recipes with the Right Tools

There are some television chefs who cook by feel, they never measure anything, they don’t time things, and somehow it always comes out perfect. Maybe it’s their long years of experience cooking professionally, or maybe it’s the magic of TV. Most of us aren’t so lucky. We carefully pour over the step by step directions of a new recipe trying to decide if it means one fluid ounce or one ounce of weight for a key ingredient. Somehow, for us amateur cooks, we are never quite sure if we made a mistake somewhere along the way, or if the picture in the magazine was doctored to make it look better than it really does.

Most recipes will say something like season to taste and there is usually a fair amount of room for you to customize a recipe according to what your family prefers. In our house, we always double the garlic called for in any recipe. Before you start improvising, though, it’s best to try once or twice to follow the recipe exactly as written. That way you have a baseline for the taste of the dish and you can adjust ingredients next time based upon the likes and dislikes of your family.

Being able to follow a recipe means being able to measure ingredients accurately. Whether it calls for a quarter teaspoon, a half a cup, or 2.5 ounces, you need the right measuring instruments to be able to dole out the correct quantities. A good set of measuring spoons, measuring cups, a timer, and a good kitchen scale are the minimum requirements for your kitchen.

After you have been weighing and measuring ingredients for some time, you’ll eventually learn to gauge amounts by eye with considerable accuracy. You’ll know just by looking whether that piece of beef is 3 ounces or 5 ounces because you’ll have weighed similar pieces on your kitchen scale many times. The same goes for ingredients that are measured by the teaspoon or other measures. Of course, it never hurts to check your own accuracy from time to time just to make sure your portions are getting gradually bigger over time.

Once you’ve got the measuring down pat, your recipes should turn out tasting as good as advertised in the cookbook or on TV. They do often doctor up the pictures to make them look prettier in the magazines, so your dishes may not come out looking like the magazine photos, but it’s the taste that matters and they all look the same after a few forkfuls have been removed.

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