diet_cat

Your Pet: How Do I Diet My Cat? It is estimated that over thirty percent of our companion dogs and cats are obese, not just overweight by a few percentage points but truly obese. That means they are hauling around thirty percent or more of excess fat. Sandra has a cat named Louie who would be included in the obese category. He weighs 26 pounds and his ideal weight according to Sandra, should be 12 pounds. Imagine that as compared to a human. It would be like a man with an ideal weight of 175 pounds instead weighing 380 pounds! Sandra has been trying for the last four months to diet Louie and is very frustrated to realize her efforts resulted in Louie gaining another pound. What can she do about Louie's weight? First of all, I must commend Sandra for trying to address Louie's weight. It is a very serious issue and in his case I suspect it is entering to the realm of life threatening though I am sure Louie would not agree. Purposeful weight loss can be a challenge for people as well as their companions. Sometimes it may be even tougher to diet our companions, especially if they are good at manipulating us. I can almost see many of you out there shaking your heads in agreement. Let's start by addressing the fundamentals of weight loss. Simply put, weight will be lost if the intake of calories is less than the calories needed to maintain current weight. Now what could be easier? Just feed less than Louie needs to weigh twenty-six pounds and the weight will be lost. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Every individual cat, and for that matter any creature, is different as to how many calories they burn per unit time and then how many calories they need to support their weight whatever that might be. This calorie burning rate can be manipulated upwards through exercise but I must say, it can be difficult to force a cat to exercise consistently. Dogs are usually much more amendable to exercise. Now, since Louie is not a dog, we will not put exercise into our calorie burning equation. Instead, we will come up with a feeding strategy designed to cause weight loss. When I design a weight loss schedule, especially when the patient is morbidly obese like Louie, I recommend blood testing after a thorough physical evaluation before embarking. This can help rule in or out various possible metabolic problems that might be contributing to Louie's weight problem. It can also be very important to help identify possible disease processes that may have developed as a result of his obesity. Diabetes and heart disease are distinctly possible. Hopefully Louie has no underlying disease and no secondary disease and we can proceed with restricting the calorie intake. In cases involving hugely overweight patients, I use a special prescription diet containing fewer calories per unit volume, less caloric density, while still maintaining bulk in the food. This helps to fill the patient's stomach giving the feeling of satiation without the added calories of a regular diet. There are no over the counter diets that allow this amount of calorie restriction. We start by figuring Louie will need about 30 calories per pound of body weight per day. This number is an average and as I mentioned, every cat is different. We multiple the 30 by his ideal body weight which is twelve pounds according to Sandra. So he needs 360 calories per day. Remember, that is to maintain ideal weight, we must subtract some amount from that number in order to reduce the body weight over time. I would back off from the 360 calories by about 120 calories per day and knowing that fat has about 3600 calories in one pound, we can anticipate a weight loss rate over time. In order to feed the recommended 240 calories we've calculated, we must know the caloric density of the food. In the case of the diet I mentioned, there is 260 calories in a cup therefore Louie will need slightly less than one cup per day. Back to our calculations, 3600 divided by 120 gives us a loss of about one pound of fat per thirty days. Thirty days times fourteen pounds of needed fat loss gives us a total time of 420 days for Louie to reach his ideal weight. This is of course a dynamic calculation as every cat is different. Knowing this, we will weigh Louie once a month and adjust his caloric intake up or down depending of the rate of loss. Once Louie reaches his target weight, we can then put him on a maintenance diet containing approximately 360 calories per day. This can be any high quality diet. Remember that this amount does not include any treats or other dietary intake. One important point to remember here when beginning and maintaining a diet program for our companions is that they may not buy into the whole idea. They will use every trick and manipulation technique they have to get you to feed them more. Stay strong my friends and know that what you are doing might just be saving your beloved companion's life.