Nutrition, Diabetes, Grooming, Weight Management of Pets

[Michael Tucker]

This is a collection of several forms I’ve found very helpful to track and maintain blood glucose levels for my diabetic dog. It also helped me to build her weight back up over several months at the same time keeping a check on her blood glucose readings.
It allowed me to look at the nutrition breakdowns of various foods to try to feed her foods that might be helpful in the glucose management and weight gain.

This was based on a form I had used for many years to collect general data for a wide variety of pets. I expanded it to help with the diabetes management recently when one of my pets got sick and we eventually learned it was diabetes.

Since some folks may want an “all in one” application.. I added a couple of sections (forms) for pedigree and to input your doctors’ and vendors’ information. I suppose you could add another form to track such things as appointments when you went to the vet or to the hairdresser, but I did not add on that module.

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There are some records included, which you can delete if you want to.

In the “Pets>Groom•Meds•Weight” form I kept 2 of the daily records in place as an example.

In the “Pets>Foods•Cost•Nutrition” form ALL 162 records are maintained as they could be useful, definitely a look thru will show the intended use.

In the form “Pets>Calculations•HELP•Notes” ALL 52 records are maintained — where you can read my mini manual — how I felt the forms could be used; and there are a lot of golden nugget hints from my experience and then some research notes that might help if you are new to a pet (especially a dog) with diabetes.

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I used this set of forms successfully to help figure out which foods and the portion sizes to feed my dog to balance what amount of glucose injections — to get to acceptable glucose readings.

The form takes into account the weight of the pet and the amount of food you are serving and breaks out the nutrition numbers if you want to target say less carbs or more protein. Or say you want to feed slightly less to guide the animal to lose some weight or vice versa.

On the Mac Desktop version, there is a “DiabeticDayLog” layout that brings the data together in a meaningful view, like a report. And the default layout, with Multi-column list view, will give summaries of much of the data you are collecting, like the number of calories, the % of fat, the cost per portion and the cost per year of the range of data you selected.

I found the iOS version most helpful to take with me and input data in real time during feeding, weighing, injection times, etc.

The TapForms Application (and this set of forms) has been most helpful to me in a most difficult time trying to manage the diabetes of this pet, and I hope sharing this may be useful to someone else. Having a wheel instead of having to build a wheel, so to speak.

However you use it, it helps you start and maintain a history which can be very revealing of possible trends over time.

Vets can be either welcoming or the opposite to these sorts of things.
Whether a vet or anyone else for that matter endorses your attempts to keep your data and understand it or not, I believe it is a good thing to be proactive with a pet rather than assume some food that is recommend or some advise on the internet is valid or some other protocol we are told by a “professional” is written in stone. In your own time, and with this software, you can better evaluate the advise and claims given to you and your pet or try different things you read about for yourself and see the results based on actual data.

[Brendan]

Hi Michael,

Well, even though I increased the file size limit, for some reason WordPress isn’t allowing me to upload the file after multiple attempts.

Here is the link to the file in a folder on Michael’s Dropbox:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/l0aclhzvm8rq0mz/AAAPyskZfBpyFsYr8n5eG6wla?dl=0

Thanks for sharing!

Brendan

[Michael Tucker]

The file [in the prior post] has been updated and the newer version uploaded to the folder today. The old version I deleted.

In this update..
–There are now a few more food records (just as we added to our records in actual day to day use);
–The yearly calculation for food cost was multiplying a day’s cost double the days in a year, it’s corrected in this version;
–The custom layout in the main form was changed a little to accommodate a new field or two;
–Help file changed to ignore issues in software now resolved;
–Help file expanded to explain how to adjust columns (number of digits) in some applicable calculations, if desired;

Especially visible in multi-column view on Mac OSX…
–There are more example records included in the main form (which lets you see how it works for not only diabetic pets but other pets as well);
–Multi-column formatting has been improved for three fields; this makes the data line up better so you can quickly scan big chunks of information.

Mike

[Author]

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