Feeding – Frequency
It is difficult to say “feed x number of food items per day for a monitor x years of age”, because there are simply too many variables. Size, sex, enclosure size, basking temperatures, and ability to exercise, will all determine optimal feeding.
Having mentioned several times throughout the site that obesity is a problem facing all captive monitor keepers, there are two points to note:
One, large meals followed by lulls in feeding encourage the storage of fat and lead to obesity. Small, every-day to every-other-day feedings, especially for younger monitors, keep the digestive tract operating efficiently. If circumstances allow, the youngest monitors can be fed lower numbers of insects more than once a day. In the wild, the monitor will forage every day, throughout the day, eating smaller “meals” much more frequently.
Two, how much a monitor will eat and how much it should eat are often very different. In the wild, the monitor often does not know when its next meal will take place, so it will eat all it can, when it can. Eating until the monitor is no longer hungry will quickly cause the monitor to surpass its optimal weight.