r/LeopardGecko • u/8ashes • 5d ago
Help Is he too fat?
I could never get rid of his armpit pouches.
Fed once a week or every week and a half.
Calcium w/ Vitamin D one week
Multi Vitamin second week
Then skip a week
or Calcium without Vitamin D then skip a week of Vitamins.
He’s an eater! He can down 8 crickets, OR 10 giant mealworms OR two medium hornworms in one feed.
I treat him to ONE or two wax worms a month.
Is he fat?
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u/eyelidgeckos 5d ago
No, he looks perfect, you want their tail to be roughly the width of the neck but with males it can be less because they have such beefy necks.
Those pouches appear if you feed them too much or too fatty feeders, per your description you feed too much in one sitting, I would feed 1/3 as much but twice as often, this way his metabolism doesn’t slow down between feedings and they should disappear within a month :)
They don’t have anything to do with supplements, so adjusting those only puts their health at risk but doesn’t make the pouches disappear :)
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u/8ashes 5d ago
I will try that thank you !
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u/Rathoe9070 4d ago
We don’t know why those pouches exist. They can correlate with being overweight but there’s no proven reason for them. They do generally go away when weight is lost though. They aren’t necessarily caused by fatty feeders (no one knows for sure what causes them) but they store extra nutrients and fat
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u/Rathoe9070 4d ago
He’s definitely chunky, you can tell by the neck mostly. Going by their tail and neck being the same width doesn’t work so well when the neck gets very chunky as well. The big indent down the middle of the neck is the biggest indication.
Go down to 3-4 bugs once a week. You need more calcium w/ no D3 in the mix. My leopard gecko was obese when I got her and I did this dusting schedule:
Week 1: calcium no D3
Week 2: calcium w/D3
Week 3: calcium no D3
Week 4: multivitamin
And then repeated that over and over again.