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Home » Diet » I Tried Putting My Cat on a DietHere’s How It Went – Reader’s Digest

Shedding pounds the right way

Courtesy Lindsy Van Gelder

Although Phat Phil needed to become Sylph-Like Phil, or at least Somewhat-Less-of-a-Chonkster Phil, its dangerous for cats to lose weight too quickly. Crash diets can cause a potentially fatal condition called hepatic lipidodis. Rather than slash Phils weight by half or more, the vet decided to aim for a more modest goal of 18 poundsstill 25 percent of his body weight, or the equivalent of a 200-pound human whittling down to 150. She sent me to a website that calculates how many calories a day a pet needs in order to slenderize at a healthy pace. We were on our way.

Courtesy Lindsy Van Gelder

Phil eats a combination of raw, freeze-dried, and canned food, and he began his diet at 271 calories a day. Have you ever tried to figure out the calories in your cats favorite brands? Some dont say at all. Others tell you in teeny-tiny print. Or they publish it in terms that require you to go back to high school algebra and figure out, say, that if an ounce of freeze-dried chicken nuggets contains 125 calories, with a kitchen cup weighing about 1.6 ounces, and 50 nuggets fit in a cup, each nugget haswait, carry the 3. In general, this is the very best diet for cats, according to vets.

Courtesy Lindsy Van Gelder

Not surprisingly, a small food scale and a calculator are now fixtures in my cat-food cupboard. I also realized that theres a huge disparity in how fattening different foods are. A small pouch of one of Phils favorite brands can range from under 50 calories to more than 100. So, one of the first things I had to do was to find a happy medium of flavors that he liked, that would fill him up, and that would stay within his calorie count. Ive become the Nancy Pelosi of cat-food-ingredient calorie counting.

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I Tried Putting My Cat on a DietHere's How It Went - Reader's Digest

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Home » Diet » I Tried Putting My Cat on a DietHere’s How It Went – Reader’s Digest