weight managment diets?

[mrgoogls]

i have heard from a few sources that "free feeding" or leaving the food in a bowl 24/7 isnt good and can cause obesity. so people only feed their birds a few meals a day. how exactly do you do that? like when do you feed them, how much do you feed per meal, what do you feed each meal, ect. i also heard that some people that do this also leave a little food in the cage all day but in foraging toys or only available via foraging. also, now, i leave veggies on a skewer for the day and change and take it out at night, what would i do with that? im interested in this way of feeding because i obviously dont want cooper overweight, but i have NO clue what it is all about.

[laducockatiel]

Here's an article Michael wrote about weight management (it's about why to do it rather than how to do it, however it is still quite useful): http://trainedparrot.com/Weight_Management/

I've never tried weight management with Ladu, so I'm not sure how you would go about doing it. However, I think if you email Michael or PM him, he would let you know.

Hope this helps

-Laducockatiel

[mrgoogls]

Thanks. I actually already read the blog post about it. thats one of the few things that got me interested in a diet like that. i just cant find many sources explaining exactly how to do it, just why.

[Michael]

Thanks for checking out my article about the importance of food management. The reason I don't have anything about the actual practice of diet management is because there is a lot to it and a lot of responsibility involved. It's not that it is dangerous but you need to be aware of how much food the bird needs, when it needs it, and how to adjust this as needed. My food management approach is tied in with training and other aspects of parrot ownership (for example training provides feedback and gives birds opportunities to earn more food if they so wish). For these reasons I only outline the application of food management amidst my complete approach in my book, the Parrot Wizard's Guide to Well-Behaved Parrots.

There may be other sources out there, but I'm not aware. It's taken me years of consulting with vets, reading, and experimenting to optimize my food management routines.

[Pajarita]

I feed about an hour after the sky is lit and an hour before it gets too dark. This time of the year, here in USA Northeast, it's around 7 am and 7 pm but it changes with the seasons as the days get shorter or longer.

I give them breakfast (gloop and raw produce) early in the morning and, from trial and error have narrowed the amount of gloop I put out so, by the time I go back into the birdroom in the evening to feed them dinner (birds require only two meals a day), there is very little gloop left on the plates. I don't really measure the raw produce (they get one fruit, one veggie and one leafy green a day, a different one each day of the week) and usually put out more than they would eat to encourage them to eat as much produce as possible. For dinner, again, it's mostly trial and error but, rule of thumb, feed enough seeds and nuts to fill their crop and no more than that.