Is your tabby too tubby? Is your cat extra-fluffy and not in a good way?
Omaha in 2002 - over 20 pounds
Well, if you haven’t already, start by eliminating ALL DRY FOOD. ALL OF IT. Attempting to get a cat to lose weight on dry food is a losing battle. I know, I tried it for over a year with my cat Omaha. We tried cutting portions again and again until he got only 1/8 cup dry food daily and lay by the bowl crying – and still not losing weight. “Lite” (lower calorie) dry foods DO NOT WORK, they are too high in carbohydrates. Low-carb grain-free high-protein dry foods DO NOT WORK, they are too high in calories. Your cat needs to eat only WET food – not only to achieve an ideal weight, but to avoid a lot of other serious health issues (like diabetes, urinary tract disease, etc.)
But what do you do if you’ve eliminated all the dry food and your cat is still chunky?
- Exercise! Play with your cat and get him/her moving!
- Reduce portion size! Pet food labels are created by the pet food manufacturers, who want to sell MORE food. An average adult cat needs somewhere between 4 and 8 ounces of high-quality wet food daily to satisfy their nutritional requirements. One rule-of-thumb is 25 calories per pound per day of IDEAL weight to maintain, 20 calories/pound ideal weight per day to lose weight, 30 calories per pound of ideal weight per day to gain weight. The average 3 oz can of cat food contains about 70-90 calories. So, for a cat that should weigh 8 pounds (and weighs more), that’s about 160 calories per day, or two 3-oz cans of food. PLEASE keep in mind that the average cat should weigh 8 -10 pounds and not more! We are so used to seeing fat cats many of us don’t know what a cat of ideal weight looks like anymore! Also keep in mind this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule! You have to adjust for YOUR cat with its metabolism (slower or faster) and its activity level. My cats get, on average, four to five ounces of food PER DAY split into two meals.
- Try a lower-carbohydrate/lower-fat wet food! Some canned foods are really high in carbohydrates. (Read the ingredients! Rice, corn, gravy, vegetables… they generally mean higher carbohydrates) Also, some canned foods are really high in fat – this is true of many of the “premium” brands. Fat and carbohydrates are cheaper than protein – so the manufacturers are more inclined to use fat and carbohydrate in the food! In my opinion, your absolute best bet is a good raw diet (see my post on the subject here), or a low-fat/low-carbohydrate canned food like 9-Lives ground dinners, Fancy Feast, etc. See my post on canned foods here.
- Avoid prescription diets! They work no better than non-prescription foods and the ingredients are generally poorly quality. Read the labels – some aren’t even nutritionally complete!
Omaha in 2008 - about 12 pounds
More information on obesity at Feline Outreach
Life of the Lintee Bean 
I think I see my error: my guys are getting almost 8 oz of food a day. Too much! So, I will bring their weight down and do what I started to do: reduce the AMOUNT they get in a day.
Barb
I strongly endorse the advice above. I have managed to manage three cats’ weight (one to lose, one to gain and one to maintain). The scale in my kitchen is for cat food only. And playing with them is the way I have managed it and the shoelace chase is now a routine game enjoyed by us all.
Thank you so much for this! I’ve also experimented quite a bit with portion sizes myself, but failed over and over. I was starting to loose hope on making my poor cats healthier. You’re indeed correct about the labels containing the manufacturer’s daily portion recommendations. By following them, my cats got quite bigger. And that’s because I’m using a (allegedly) low-calorie dry food.
To me, your rule-of-thumb was the most precious piece of information on your post, because I can’t afford to feed them wet food every day. So, even though I know you’ve said all dry foods (even the “lite” ones) are too high in carbohydrates, maybe controlling the amount of ingested calories will work?
I’ve calculated new portion sizes using your rule and the food calories per Kilo (instead of just using the label ratio) and the numbers seemed pretty reasonable to me… I’ll just have to try.
Thanks again!
Stefano,
I would urge you to reconsider feeding dry food. It generally does NOT work. When I adopted Omaha, I didn’t know any better and I just kept feeding him a “diet” dry food – reducing portions again and again until he got merely 1/8 cup a day and lay by his food bowl crying all night – and still did not lose weight. Please don’t do that to your cats!
9-Lives, Friskies, etc, are decent canned foods that can cost only 30 cents a day. any money that may cost above the feeding of dry food will be made up MANY times over by reductions in veterinary bills. If you can’t afford canned food, how will you afford the insulin and drugs and sub-q fluids that will be necessary when your cats develop diseases caused by the dry food?
Lynette
Lynette,
I really appreciate your help, since a couple of months ago I remember not being able to find any reliable information on persistently obese cats. Even though I’m still reading all the information I’ve found here, I would like to say a few words about my previous post:
As I don’t live in the U.S. none of the alternatives mentioned in your blog is available to me. I remember feeding them Hill’s a while ago, when one of my cats had mouth surgery, but it was prohibitively expensive.
So, what I meant by “I cannot afford feed them wet foods daily” was: I can’t seem to find a good and affordable canned food in my country, to replace the “super-premium” dry food I’m currently feeding them.
But then again I was erroneously talking about good brands and not actually reading the ingredients and looking for “rats in cans”.
I’ll read some more, do research on what I do have available and provide the very best treatment for my poor furry friends. I suspect that I may be turning into a crazy cat man myself. 😀