Putting cat on a diet
Brian Pomeroy
We have an 8-year-old orange male cat who weighs nearly 30 pounds. We are
working to put and keep him on a diet; has anyone else had an obese,
compulsively eating cat who had to go on a diet? If so, your experiences,
tips, etc. would be greatly appreciated.
--
Brian Pomeroy
lu...@voicenet.com
http://www.ison.com/pomeroy/
Author, "BeginnerNet: A Beginner's Guide to the Internet and WWW"
http://www.slackinc.com/books/33225hom.htm
Phyllis Lee
Hi Brian,
My 4 PrettyBoy also has a weight problem. He already tipped the scales and ballooned on
out while we had the foster litter with us - too much dipping into their high calorie KMR
and kitten food! Our Vet put him on the RD diet.....big change from CD and it took some
time to get him to accept the new food. One thing we've found helpful in his weight loss
is to play with him and take him outside in the yard so he can run and jump to his
heart's content. It will probably take some coaxing to get your fella to move around
enough to slim down.....PrettyBoy was so fat that he wanted to sleep all the time.
Anything you can do to distract your cat will help to keep his mind off of eating and
begging for tidbits. PrettyBoy is slimming down finally, but it has to be a slow process
because obese cats have high fat levels in their livers and if they stop eating too fast
or lose too fast they can become quite ill. I don't know the technical terms for the
liver problems with obese cats, but your Vet or someone else on this ng can help you
there. Good luck and a long happy life with your cat! Phyllis Lee, PrettyBoy & Sputnik
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robert a. moeser
In article <lunar-08099...@pitman110.voicenet.com>,
lu...@voicenet.com (Brian Pomeroy) wrote:
:We have an 8-year-old orange male cat who weighs nearly 30 pounds. We are
:working to put and keep him on a diet; has anyone else had an obese,
:compulsively eating cat who had to go on a diet? If so, your experiences,
:tips, etc. would be greatly appreciated.
we put lennie, who was up to 17.7 pounds and rising, on a diet of r/d.
i made the switch very gradually over two weeks. he actually gets more r/d
than he was getting of his regular science diet. he knew there was something
funny going on, but he does eat the new food.
i feed him half in the morning, half in the afternoon, and he gets NO OTHER
FOOD EVER AT ANY TIME. this is critical.
it may take some time for your cat to catch on that you are serious about
this diet thing. be strong! if he absolutely does not eat the new food,
even if you switch very gradually, you have to worry about that. it is
very bad for a cat to not eat at all. but whining and complaining and
begging for snacks can be safely ignored if your cat eats the offered
food at meal time.
a vet should be able to help you decide how much to feed your cat, how fast
your cat can lose weight, and how and when to decrease his rations.
it is important and useful to keep an accurate record of your cat's
weight. for a dieting cat, ounces are like pounds to a dieting human.
i use an old vegetable "clock-dial" scale, and i hang lennie from it
in his carrier and get a good reading to the fraction of an ounce.
then i subtract the weight of the empty carrier.
i weigh lennie right after he uses the litter box but before mealtime.
(when else? :-) never-the-less, there is about a +/- 2 ounce margin of
error based on where he is in his not-super-regular daily schedule
of eliminating and drinking (water) and nibbling,
lennie is well on his way to his "fighting weight", but it has been a
very slow and steady progress. as long as he is losing weight, i'm
satisified.
last time the vet saw him, she lowered his target weight by a pound! so
now he has to get down to 14 pounds, which gives him (still) over a pound
to go. he already looks much better, and moves around with his old
agility and confidence.
i am to lower his amounts of food also - but that might be tough... lennie
is already very hungry at mealtimes and i don't want to give the poor
guy a complex!
you can see a chart of his meteoric weight gain (after neutering and being
indoor-ized) and his post-diet decline at
http://www.tiac.net/users/ram/weight.jpg
and pictures of him and some other cats starting at
-- rob