Our cat’s official name is Rascal, but we usually refer to him as Little Man. I gave him that name at some point after his successful campaign to convert me into a person who likes cats – at least one cat, anyway.
I’m pretty sure after he joined the family two years ago, he evaluated us all and figured out I was the only one who wasn’t delighted by his presence. Okay, he said to himself, I’ll work on him. He took to jumping on my lap when I was watching TV late at night – which scared me out of my skin the first few times – and settling down for a long purr.
Later, he decided to make me his sparring partner. Whenever he gets the chance, he jumps onto my office chair and adopts a fighting pose he probably imagines is intimidating. If I walk near the chair, he swipes at me, and the sparring is on. I try to poke him in various places, while he swipes at my hand and tries to catch a finger in his teeth. If he does catch a finger, he gives it an oh-so-gentle nip to let me know he won the round. I call this game of his En Garde, Mister!
(Little Man playing En Garde, Mister! with my hand.)
A couple of months before the cruise, Little Man and I were engaged in a spirited round of En Garde, Mister! when he rolled onto his back as part of some fancy martial-arts move. I poked him in the belly and was surprised at how big and soft it had become.
What the …?
Little Man had become Tubby Man.
Up until a month or two earlier, he’d been living on canned cat food that’s primarily meat and organ meat. There’s rice in some of the flavors, but not much. For variety, Chareva also fed him sardines, mackerel and tuna.
Then she found a brand of dry cat food that brags No Corn, Wheat or Soy, No Artificial Colors, Flavors or Ingredients on the label. Little Man liked the stuff, so she put it out along with the canned food. Over time, he ate less of the canned food and more of the dry food.
So when I found myself poking a newly-rotund cat belly, I checked the ingredients on the bag of dry food. The first ingredient listed is chicken. That’s good. The next three ingredients are pea powder, barley and brown rice. Well, I wouldn’t call those bad, but it’s clear the dry cat food is considerably more carb-laden than the canned stuff.
I wondered to myself, Did Little Man become Tubby Man because we inadvertently jacked up the carbohydrate content of his diet?
Naaaawww, that can’t be. Legions of internet cowboys have informed me (and everyone on the Fat Head Facebook group) that macronutrients are irrelevant. If you get fat, it’s because you eat too @#$%ing much, too @#$%ing often, period. It’s a simple matter of ingesting too many calories.
Therefore, it was obvious that our Little Man – who for nearly two years had exercised the willpower to limit his calories and maintained a sleek, feline body as a result – was developing a serious flaw in his character. He’d become a glutton without any of us noticing until it was too late. I don’t track his daily activity, but I’ll bet he was also getting lazy and moving less … fewer unexplained mad-dashes around the house and across the top of all the furniture, perhaps.
Anyway, despite being assured by legions of internet cowboys that macronutrients have nothing to do with weight gain, we put the dry food back in the pantry and started feeding him the canned meat again. A month later, he was looking sleek. Had to be a coincidence, of course. I can only guess that somewhere around the time we put the pea-barley-rice dry food away, he happened to recognize himself in a mirror, was disgusted by his tubby appearance, and put himself on a diet.
When we went on the low-carb cruise, we boarded the dogs at a kennel but let Little Man stay at home. Chareva filled a big dispenser with the dry cat food and put out several dishes of water. A friend of Chareva’s also dropped by a couple of times to check on him after feeding our chickens.
Well, wouldn’t you know it … when we returned home eight days later, Little Man was turning into Tubby Man again. I’m not going to chalk it up to a character flaw, since he’d been disciplined enough to eat less and lose weight before we left for the cruise. The obvious explanation this time was emotional eating. The poor cat probably felt abandoned and unloved when we left him home alone, so he comforted himself by eating too much. As Dr. Oz once said about Oprah, “She isn’t really craving food; she’s craving love.” If Little Man had opposable thumbs, he probably would have picked up the TV remote and spent hours watching chick flicks while stuffing himself with the pea-barley-rice food.
But we’ve been back for more than a week, and he’s not engaging in emotional over-eating anymore. He’s even trimmed down noticeably. It has to be because he feels loved and supported again now that we’re home. It can’t have anything to do with the fact that he’s back to a meat-and-fish diet … because as legions of internet cowboys have assured me, macronutrient ratios don’t have anything to do with gaining or losing weight.
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My 5 year old cat, Buddy Boys eats twice a day with a few snacks thru out the day. He gays raw liver for breakfast and raw shrimp for dinner, he’s a lean boy, never over eats…at least not yet anyways.
We give Rascal as much of the meat-based wet food as he wants, but he just doesn’t overeat on it. Sounds familiar, eh?
Our last two cats, some years before our own carb enlightenment, died of complications from diabetes. Pet diabetes used to be unheard of. Now it’s pandemic.
Cats, being true carnivores, and not omnivores like us, are likely much more sensitive to the general carb crap put in their food, and who knows what the downside is to any gluten-bearing crap in particular.
Packaged commercial animal feeds often contain lots of label detail, but routinely omit a summary of total carbohydrate. They no doubt quite reasonably assume that sales would be seriously affected if they published that macronutrient. So the buyer has to puzzle it out from the list of ingredients.
The pet food industry (can you say “Chinese melamine”) assumes no one cares. A rising number of people do. Rachael Ray is even catering to those who do.
Consensus pet food scientists and formulators, coarsely ground, might actually be a decent cat food ingredient.
LOL, had a similar issue with a dog some years back before I had gotten into the low carb mindset. She had gotten up to 52 pounds eating the *exact same amount& of identical food as her 25-pound brother, and nothing seemed to change that, though 35 pounds would have been a better weight for her. Vet put her on a low fat (thus very high carb) diet and I gave it to her in minute portions which she wolfed down in about 30 seconds and BEGGED for more (which I hard-heartedly didn’t give her) But despite that her weight kept going UP.
Around that time I discovered low carb and got the idea of trying it on my dog – so did the exact OPPOSITE of what my vet told me to do – gave her high protein, high fat, low carb food. Withing four months she was down to 35 pounds (after YEARS of trying to get weight off her) and she kept it off the rest of her life as I continued to feed her the high fat, high protein diet. She lived to be fourteen and might have lived longer if I’d known about low carb earlier.
In the meantime I currently also have five cats, and they all eat grain-free, though not especially low carb, dry food. Can’t afford the canned wet food all the time for all those cats, though they sometimes get some as a treat. Four of the five are skinny and sleek, and the fifth, for years, was built like a basketball with legs. On the exact same food she’s gotten much skinnier in the past year, but I think it’s because she’s 19 years old and just not eating as much as she used to.
Cats are pure carnivores (unlike dogs) — so why on earth does -any- cat food have grains and legumes in it? It’s even less defensible than when they put it in dog food. So much pet food in general is cheap carbage, no wonder half of all pets in the USA are overweight or obese now: http://www.petobesityprevention.org/
Couldn’t possibly be because it’s cheaper for the manufacturer — if the cat gets fat, they just blame it on the cat being spayed/neutered or guilt trip the owner for neglecting to exercise them enough. =P
Good thing you noticed and knew what to do. Otherwise, he could have eventually become diabetic, as well–as did my cat–from the high carb content of the dry food. My cat became diabetic (I didn’t know any better than to give him the high carb stuff–this was pre Taubes and Fat Head. The vet put him on insulin and my daughter (in Vet school at the time) supplied him with “diabetes management” food from Purina that was high protein low carb and he attained normal weight and activities (and BG). He even had periods when he didn’t need any insulin at all–for a couple of years at a time–as long as we kept feeding him the DM food. And when he did need insulin, it was always a really small amount compared to when he was first diagnosed.
Careful, if the Honerable Dean Ornish MD reads this he might not pick up on the sarcasm.
I’ll risk it.
Have you tried shaming and verbal abuse? I believe that’s supposed to be highly effective. On the other hand, while macronutrients certainly are irrelevant, are you monitoring his salt intake closely enough? Canned food is high in sodium and as we all know sodium has be scientifically proven to produce a statistically significant rise in blood pressure.
I’ll try that as an experiment: let Little Man eat the dry food, but constantly nag him about his weight.
It might be helpful to post a BMI chart above his food dish. And maybe put a shelf there with one of those silicone 5 pounds of muscle versus 5 pounds of fat displays.
Incidentally, I’ve thrown in the approximate numbers for your cat in a BMI calculator. I’m guessing at his specifics, of course, but cats average about 10″ tall, so if he weighs 12 pounds, he has a BMI of 84.4. To help give little man a goal, to reach a normal BMI of 21, he should weigh 3 pounds.
Perhaps I should rig up contraption where to get his food, he has to step on a scale and have it register less than three pounds.
Make sure to constantly tease and abuse him. Cortisol has been shown to modulate metabolism. Don’t miss that opportunity!
Seriously, cats have a metabolism that’s basically lost the ability to process anything that isn’t mice (some plants too but mainly for cleaning the intestines).
Their GNG runs at about 500% of human, they get all their glucose from it, they don’t even have a taste for sugar IIRC. They also lost the enzymes to tinker with a lot of fatty acids so these have to come in with mice.
I don’t know how much glucose they can buffer but I guess it isn’t much. It would be fascinating to look at their insulin response and why they would even need one, eating no carbs in the wild. Anyway, RDA Carbs is obviously zero. A bit more for dogs I guess, they’ll chew anything.
THIS is why I am not on the facebook page much anymore. So much garbage. F those cowboys and the horses they rode in on…I will eat TONS of food and still be able to count my ribs lol…they can starve themselves while I chow down on low carb here. As much food as I want…every day and loving it.
I’ll have to check the ingredients of our “grain free” dry food. Our cats are nuts for it, treat it like Doritos, and are a bit tubby.
Ours wouldn’t count as grain free with the rice and barley, but yeah, it sounds like there’s something besides meat in your cats’ food.
Grain free does not equal low carb. My cat gained on Taste of the Wild, but he’s much sleeker on Evo Chicken and Turkey (their lowest carb formula). The vet told me it was because Taste of the Wild is high calorie, though. He also eats mice, which are the perfect cat food. I wonder why the cat food manufacturers haven’t come out with a mouse flavor.
You are such a hoot, Tom! Loved this story.
You post made me think about our Lab and her weight gain. MY mother-in-law from Europe visited for 7 months. She doesn’t speak English so her normal visits are not so bad for me. My wife on the other hand cannot get along with her mother. Anyways my MIL decides she would take over the cooking for lunch and dinner everyday(my wife and I can go home for lunch everyday). My MIL is short and round. I think you can see where this is going. All her meals are carb laden. My wife tried to explain to her our low carb lifestyle. That didn’t work. I would shop for vegetables and other grocery items to fix my meals for myself. That didn’t work. She would take what I had bought and mix it into her carb laden meals. I gained weight, my wife gained weight, and the dog gained weight. She secretly feeds the dog for it’s affection. I asked my wife if she told her mother what she was doing to us. She did tell her and told me her mother was proud of our weight gain. As I mentioned above her normal shorter visits are not that bad. This time I was begging my wife to move up her return flight. I offered money, I offered to take her to the airport the same day, and I offered my wife a trip to Paris if she would get her mom out of here. Nothing worked. She finally left 3 weeks ago. Our Lab is doing so much better and has lost the weight. The next time the MIL is coming over I plan on renting an apartment to have a secret low carb lifestyle. The wife & dog will be on their own.
Sounds like next time she comes over you should eat ONE meal and then within the hour start holding your stomach and wailing like a banshee for a few hours; maybe a few mad bathroom dashes thrown in. Then you can calmly refuse all further grain/carby feeding. After all that food IS making you sick. This just puts it in more of a visual perspective then just telling her so.
Could you please tell us what brand of cat food you feed Little Man? When I took my 18-month-old Maine Coon kitty, Emmylou Hairiest, to the vet last week, she was 17.9 lbs. You can’t feel her ribs and her tum is definitely rounder than it should be. I’ve tried to find an all-meat canned food not made in China, and no luck so far. I’ve tried giving her real beef and chicken such as I eat, and she won’t touch it. The only “people” food she’ll eat is regular tuna, and too much of that is very bad for cats. Oh, and if I drop a granola bar crumb, she’s on it like a duck on a June bug, but that’s also not good for cats. Thanks much.
My 5 year old cat, Buddy Boys eats twice a day with a few snacks thru out the day. He gays raw liver for breakfast and raw shrimp for dinner, he’s a lean boy, never over eats…at least not yet anyways.
We give Rascal as much of the meat-based wet food as he wants, but he just doesn’t overeat on it. Sounds familiar, eh?
It’s quite a stretch for those folks to say that macronutrient content/ratios are meaningless.
That said, I suspect a diet consisting primarily (or even solely) of meat and fish would be much more appropriate for a cat than a human. Cats have mostly sharp teeth, a short digestive tract, and other features more resembling carnivores than do humans. Human teeth, tract, etc are like a cross between this sort of carnivore and herbivores, such as ruminants, who have mostly molars and long, complex GI tracts.
Based upon this standard, Dr. Weston Price’s observations, and evolutionary evidence, it seems to me humans seeking optimal health ought to be eating a mix of animal products and plant products, to include starchy & fibrous ones.
Our last two cats, some years before our own carb enlightenment, died of complications from diabetes. Pet diabetes used to be unheard of. Now it’s pandemic.
Cats, being true carnivores, and not omnivores like us, are likely much more sensitive to the general carb crap put in their food, and who knows what the downside is to any gluten-bearing crap in particular.
Packaged commercial animal feeds often contain lots of label detail, but routinely omit a summary of total carbohydrate. They no doubt quite reasonably assume that sales would be seriously affected if they published that macronutrient. So the buyer has to puzzle it out from the list of ingredients.
The pet food industry (can you say “Chinese melamine”) assumes no one cares. A rising number of people do. Rachael Ray is even catering to those who do.
Consensus pet food scientists and formulators, coarsely ground, might actually be a decent cat food ingredient.
Yeah, I looked for a total carb count on the dry cat food and didn’t find one. Just a list of ingredients.
So you fed your cat something without a nutrition label? Of course your cat got fat! How was he supposed to count his calories without a nutrition label? (And cats can’t really be expected to read the label on the package, which is probably all the way over on the pantry, so the complete label should be printed on each granule of food. In local, non-gmo, organic edible ink.)
I’m going to lobby for that labeling law.
LOL, had a similar issue with a dog some years back before I had gotten into the low carb mindset. She had gotten up to 52 pounds eating the *exact same amount& of identical food as her 25-pound brother, and nothing seemed to change that, though 35 pounds would have been a better weight for her. Vet put her on a low fat (thus very high carb) diet and I gave it to her in minute portions which she wolfed down in about 30 seconds and BEGGED for more (which I hard-heartedly didn’t give her) But despite that her weight kept going UP.
Around that time I discovered low carb and got the idea of trying it on my dog – so did the exact OPPOSITE of what my vet told me to do – gave her high protein, high fat, low carb food. Withing four months she was down to 35 pounds (after YEARS of trying to get weight off her) and she kept it off the rest of her life as I continued to feed her the high fat, high protein diet. She lived to be fourteen and might have lived longer if I’d known about low carb earlier.
In the meantime I currently also have five cats, and they all eat grain-free, though not especially low carb, dry food. Can’t afford the canned wet food all the time for all those cats, though they sometimes get some as a treat. Four of the five are skinny and sleek, and the fifth, for years, was built like a basketball with legs. On the exact same food she’s gotten much skinnier in the past year, but I think it’s because she’s 19 years old and just not eating as much as she used to.
Small portions, still hungry, begging for more, not losing weight … sounds like a lunch program designed by the USDA.
Ah, that was the perfect zinger.
“The all kids left hungry lunch program.”
Cats are pure carnivores (unlike dogs) — so why on earth does -any- cat food have grains and legumes in it? It’s even less defensible than when they put it in dog food. So much pet food in general is cheap carbage, no wonder half of all pets in the USA are overweight or obese now: http://www.petobesityprevention.org/
Couldn’t possibly be because it’s cheaper for the manufacturer — if the cat gets fat, they just blame it on the cat being spayed/neutered or guilt trip the owner for neglecting to exercise them enough. =P
Chareva once bumped into a dog-food maker’s rep at a pet store. He assured her dogs need carbohydrates for energy. That would be news to my energetic Rottweilers.
I use to feel my dogs just chicken, pig’s feet, and liver. But after we moved out of the South, that was too expensive. So I have cut down on the meat and have added rice. No change in health. I think dogs can tolerate a certain amount of carbs without negative affect. However, if they get into dry dog food, one of the three has bloody stool for the next couple of days and an allergic reaction (which is why I moved them off the dry dog food in the first place.)
Yeesh. That’s all the reason I’d need to dump the dry food.
Good thing you noticed and knew what to do. Otherwise, he could have eventually become diabetic, as well–as did my cat–from the high carb content of the dry food. My cat became diabetic (I didn’t know any better than to give him the high carb stuff–this was pre Taubes and Fat Head. The vet put him on insulin and my daughter (in Vet school at the time) supplied him with “diabetes management” food from Purina that was high protein low carb and he attained normal weight and activities (and BG). He even had periods when he didn’t need any insulin at all–for a couple of years at a time–as long as we kept feeding him the DM food. And when he did need insulin, it was always a really small amount compared to when he was first diagnosed.
Cats with diabetes … oh, what have we done?
This is so interesting. My vet recently told me that they’re seeing diabetes in almost epic proportions in cats lately. He actually told me that the canned food tend to have fewer carbs than the dry food from the same company. I didn’t believe it and tried to check it out online, but didn’t have much luck. I had to laugh when he said that cats really do need to be on the Atkins diet.
Like DebbieC above, I have one cat who is a “basketball with legs.” She eats less than the other three cats I own, and yet they’re lean.
I feed my cats Evo brand, because it’s the highest protein (no grain) food I can find. If anyone knows of a better food for cats and dogs, I’d love to learn of it. I don’t have the time to put into making a raw-food diet. But I will pay a premium price for a good brand.
And don’t be surprised if the lean cats accuse the fat cat of eating too much.
Careful, if the Honerable Dean Ornish MD reads this he might not pick up on the sarcasm.
I’ll risk it.
Have you tried shaming and verbal abuse? I believe that’s supposed to be highly effective. On the other hand, while macronutrients certainly are irrelevant, are you monitoring his salt intake closely enough? Canned food is high in sodium and as we all know sodium has be scientifically proven to produce a statistically significant rise in blood pressure.
I’ll try that as an experiment: let Little Man eat the dry food, but constantly nag him about his weight.
It might be helpful to post a BMI chart above his food dish. And maybe put a shelf there with one of those silicone 5 pounds of muscle versus 5 pounds of fat displays.
Incidentally, I’ve thrown in the approximate numbers for your cat in a BMI calculator. I’m guessing at his specifics, of course, but cats average about 10″ tall, so if he weighs 12 pounds, he has a BMI of 84.4. To help give little man a goal, to reach a normal BMI of 21, he should weigh 3 pounds.
Perhaps I should rig up contraption where to get his food, he has to step on a scale and have it register less than three pounds.
I think that a scale is too direct. It would be better if you measured the width of his tail, then determined his weight by a formula which was last calibrated in the 1970s. Using rats. But I don’t think that this should be an individual initiative. What we really need is a regulation requiring you to employ someone to measure your cat’s tail before his feedings. (For efficiency, perhaps he should mail the results off to a central location to streamline the decision making process.) Simple solutions never work, which you know because any idiot could come up with a simple solution.
Or we could send him to cat school and order the schools to take and report those measurements.
I think that you’re on to something, but who will measure the cat’s tail and restrict its portion size after it graduates?
Perhaps we can train the dogs to belittle him if he gains weight.
That seems like an exquisitely crafted plan that’s can’t possibly fail. Unless the cat is stupid, the chickens are undermining it, or maybe school should run 24/7. But other than that, it can’t possibly fail. I think it’s time to go ahead with implementing it.
Consider it done. Operation Shame Cat Into Leanness is underway.
I should have been happy with that, but for some reason I wasn’t, and not in the good way that makes me better than everyone else either. Then I realized what it is. That name is far too blunt. How about Operation Cat Self Improvement?
I can go with that.
Make sure to constantly tease and abuse him. Cortisol has been shown to modulate metabolism. Don’t miss that opportunity!
Seriously, cats have a metabolism that’s basically lost the ability to process anything that isn’t mice (some plants too but mainly for cleaning the intestines).
Their GNG runs at about 500% of human, they get all their glucose from it, they don’t even have a taste for sugar IIRC. They also lost the enzymes to tinker with a lot of fatty acids so these have to come in with mice.
I don’t know how much glucose they can buffer but I guess it isn’t much. It would be fascinating to look at their insulin response and why they would even need one, eating no carbs in the wild. Anyway, RDA Carbs is obviously zero. A bit more for dogs I guess, they’ll chew anything.
Well, insulin is a necessary hormone even if you eat no carbs whatsoever. But cats sure don’t need rice or barley to be healthy.
THIS is why I am not on the facebook page much anymore. So much garbage. F those cowboys and the horses they rode in on…I will eat TONS of food and still be able to count my ribs lol…they can starve themselves while I chow down on low carb here. As much food as I want…every day and loving it.
That’s something I noticed on all the low-carb cruises: my body doesn’t want to get fat if I keep the carb count low, even when I chow down.
I’ll have to check the ingredients of our “grain free” dry food. Our cats are nuts for it, treat it like Doritos, and are a bit tubby.
Ours wouldn’t count as grain free with the rice and barley, but yeah, it sounds like there’s something besides meat in your cats’ food.
Grain free does not equal low carb. My cat gained on Taste of the Wild, but he’s much sleeker on Evo Chicken and Turkey (their lowest carb formula). The vet told me it was because Taste of the Wild is high calorie, though. He also eats mice, which are the perfect cat food. I wonder why the cat food manufacturers haven’t come out with a mouse flavor.
You are such a hoot, Tom! Loved this story.
Thank you.
You post made me think about our Lab and her weight gain. MY mother-in-law from Europe visited for 7 months. She doesn’t speak English so her normal visits are not so bad for me. My wife on the other hand cannot get along with her mother. Anyways my MIL decides she would take over the cooking for lunch and dinner everyday(my wife and I can go home for lunch everyday). My MIL is short and round. I think you can see where this is going. All her meals are carb laden. My wife tried to explain to her our low carb lifestyle. That didn’t work. I would shop for vegetables and other grocery items to fix my meals for myself. That didn’t work. She would take what I had bought and mix it into her carb laden meals. I gained weight, my wife gained weight, and the dog gained weight. She secretly feeds the dog for it’s affection. I asked my wife if she told her mother what she was doing to us. She did tell her and told me her mother was proud of our weight gain. As I mentioned above her normal shorter visits are not that bad. This time I was begging my wife to move up her return flight. I offered money, I offered to take her to the airport the same day, and I offered my wife a trip to Paris if she would get her mom out of here. Nothing worked. She finally left 3 weeks ago. Our Lab is doing so much better and has lost the weight. The next time the MIL is coming over I plan on renting an apartment to have a secret low carb lifestyle. The wife & dog will be on their own.
Geez, your mother-in-law sounds like a walking mother-in-law joke.
Sounds like next time she comes over you should eat ONE meal and then within the hour start holding your stomach and wailing like a banshee for a few hours; maybe a few mad bathroom dashes thrown in. Then you can calmly refuse all further grain/carby feeding. After all that food IS making you sick. This just puts it in more of a visual perspective then just telling her so.
Could you please tell us what brand of cat food you feed Little Man? When I took my 18-month-old Maine Coon kitty, Emmylou Hairiest, to the vet last week, she was 17.9 lbs. You can’t feel her ribs and her tum is definitely rounder than it should be. I’ve tried to find an all-meat canned food not made in China, and no luck so far. I’ve tried giving her real beef and chicken such as I eat, and she won’t touch it. The only “people” food she’ll eat is regular tuna, and too much of that is very bad for cats. Oh, and if I drop a granola bar crumb, she’s on it like a duck on a June bug, but that’s also not good for cats. Thanks much.
Chareva buys different brands. Little Man is also strangely fond of ham. If I slice up some ham, he rubs against my legs to induce me to share. If I do, he gobbles it right up.
Have you tried canned salmon? Or sardines?
It’s quite a stretch for those folks to say that macronutrient content/ratios are meaningless.
That said, I suspect a diet consisting primarily (or even solely) of meat and fish would be much more appropriate for a cat than a human. Cats have mostly sharp teeth, a short digestive tract, and other features more resembling carnivores than do humans. Human teeth, tract, etc are like a cross between this sort of carnivore and herbivores, such as ruminants, who have mostly molars and long, complex GI tracts.
Based upon this standard, Dr. Weston Price’s observations, and evolutionary evidence, it seems to me humans seeking optimal health ought to be eating a mix of animal products and plant products, to include starchy & fibrous ones.
I agree; humans are omnivores. But Little Man’s fluctuating weight certainly suggests that different foods have different effects on our tendency to get fat.
Well, I can share similar experiences..
At one point I had three cats, the oldest one left us last november at the respectable age of 18. Although in his senior years he started to put on a bit of belly fat, he was always a lean cat.
I adopted another stray 8 years ago, who grew up to be quite a monster. But he ever always preferred to eat dry food, for what reason I don’t know. He was close at one point to 10kg (20 lb) and could be best described as quasi-spherical. One of the contributing factors is perhaps the fact that we moved from a house with a garden to a flat in the center of town. The old one remained lean while he piled on the weight.
Now that we’ve switched him to high quality dry food (ie no carbs) he’s lost some weight, but is still chubby. Also I’ve managed to train my girlfriend onto not giving overabundant amounts of food to the cats, it helps….
Last september there was a newcomer. It all started with a tree going ‘meow’, and a rescued kitten that kept following me and spends now most of his time on my shoulders, or chasing the screen saver on my computer.
This young guy eats like a vacuum cleaner, and grew like wild grass (when stretched he’s now more than 3ft long), hardly ever eats dry foot and is fit as a fiddle, and immediately materialises in the kitchen the moment he hears me sharpening knives, in the hope for scraps of meat.
The other cat, the 8 years old, does not even bother, he just sits and waits in front of his food bowl.
Years ago I also had a dog, a Beauceron, the ancestor of the Rottweiler and Doberman, and a friend got at a same time a Golden Retriever. I fed my dog only top quality (no carbs) dry food recommended by the vet (and he indulged in the leftover cat food of course) and he grew to be a very lean an muscular dog.
My friend fed her dog the cheaper stuff, full of veggies and carbs, heavily advertised advertised as ‘healthy’.
Guess which dog eventually got fat…..
I guess the lesson is to put them on a meat diet from the beginning. It’s easier to stay lean than return to being lean after being fat.
It goes to show you can’t judge a book by it’s cover.
Just because the packet says “Cat Food” doesn’t mean it really is. Mice and small birds : the real Cat Food.
There’s a lesson there for everything.
He has treated himself to a couple of mice.
Tom – Our cat used to treat dry food like crack – he was addicted to it and seemed to be starving all of the time. He was up to 22lbs and the vet wanted him down to about 15 (he was a large cat anyway). When we got our dog I decided she was going to be on a raw meat and bones diet and tried converting the cat at that point but he would not have it – he was already 7 years old and set in his ways. I did convert him to wet canned, meat based cat food and low and behold he got down to his 15lbs with no more early morning walking on the head waiting for food !!! LOL
BTW – it’s been 8 years now and the dog is still on raw meat and bones, she loves it – never had a health issue.
Our dogs are on raw meat and bones as well. They’re strong, energetic, and don’t have “doggy breath” or tartar on their teeth.
I’ve heard and read that cats can become junk food junkies, just like people.
Some years ago, when I was dealing with sick cats, I did some checking. According to the catkins sites I went to, cats should be on less than 10% carbs. I also came across a quick way of finding the carb amounts in food. Its not absolute, but close enough to give me an idea. Add up all the nutrient content amounts, moisture, ash, protein, so forth, subtract that number from 100. That’s a shocking surprise in some cases.
The dry-food makers gave us the impression we were looking at meaty stuff by making chicken the #1 ingredient. All that means is that there’s more chicken than the next ingredient. Those other ingredients apparently add up to high-carb, low-protein food.
Well, I can share similar experiences..
At one point I had three cats, the oldest one left us last november at the respectable age of 18. Although in his senior years he started to put on a bit of belly fat, he was always a lean cat.
I adopted another stray 8 years ago, who grew up to be quite a monster. But he ever always preferred to eat dry food, for what reason I don’t know. He was close at one point to 10kg (20 lb) and could be best described as quasi-spherical. One of the contributing factors is perhaps the fact that we moved from a house with a garden to a flat in the center of town. The old one remained lean while he piled on the weight.
Now that we’ve switched him to high quality dry food (ie no carbs) he’s lost some weight, but is still chubby. Also I’ve managed to train my girlfriend onto not giving overabundant amounts of food to the cats, it helps….
Last september there was a newcomer. It all started with a tree going ‘meow’, and a rescued kitten that kept following me and spends now most of his time on my shoulders, or chasing the screen saver on my computer.
This young guy eats like a vacuum cleaner, and grew like wild grass (when stretched he’s now more than 3ft long), hardly ever eats dry foot and is fit as a fiddle, and immediately materialises in the kitchen the moment he hears me sharpening knives, in the hope for scraps of meat.
The other cat, the 8 years old, does not even bother, he just sits and waits in front of his food bowl.
Years ago I also had a dog, a Beauceron, the ancestor of the Rottweiler and Doberman, and a friend got at a same time a Golden Retriever. I fed my dog only top quality (no carbs) dry food recommended by the vet (and he indulged in the leftover cat food of course) and he grew to be a very lean an muscular dog.
My friend fed her dog the cheaper stuff, full of veggies and carbs, heavily advertised advertised as ‘healthy’.
Guess which dog eventually got fat…..
I guess the lesson is to put them on a meat diet from the beginning. It’s easier to stay lean than return to being lean after being fat.
My late ginger cat, Jack, developed an overactive thyroid when he was around ten years old, and literally became a skeleton with fur on, despite the fact that he ate voraciously, and always tried to eat my other cat’s food as well as his own. I always fed them a mixture of canned cat food or the pouches, and dry food. My vet told me that he and a number of his vet colleagues were working very hard on a paper to show that commercially-produced cat foods (in the UK at least) are the reason why the incidence of cat hyperthyroidism is spiralling out of control – it was virtually unheard of twenty five or so years ago. I have since examined the content of both canned food and pouches, and in the majority of cases, within the well known British brands, the usual percentage of actual meat or fish content is only 4%. The rest is made up of who knows what? I really get cross when I go and buy my remaining cat’s biscuits and find that most brands insist on adding vegetables – to the best of my knowledge, cats have never cultivated or harvested vegetables to eat – my cat very carefully eats around the green-coloured biscuits! My cat is now 19 years old, and in good condition, thankfully, but I do think that animal food has headed in the same direction as human food. Can you believe that Bakers have actually brought out a low-fat dog food in the UK? I found myself shouting at the TV when I saw the ad for the first time! What the……???
Low-fat dog food? Head. Bang. On. Desk.
Well, there is special cat food for diabetic kitties. At least one brand I remember had significant amounts of carbs in it
(remember, this is prescription or “health” food, price*=3..7)
Related, did you ever hear of “feline hepatic lipidosis” aka “fat mobilization syndrome”? The official stance is that “suddenly”, kitty stops eating. This means the fat gets mobilised (oh no!), “processed by the liver” (wait, what? What’s to process about the FFAs the adipocytes release? Did they mean, making ketone bodies?) but “unfortunately the liver is bad at metabolizing fat” (say what? In obligate carnivore? You gotta be kidding me) so all that fat sticks in the art- I mean, in the liver (kitty acquiring a fatty liver in a week with no fats input???), and kitti has meowed for the last time. Well, poor kitty.
Peter will know best, but may I suggest an alternative pathogenesis for that? Poor kitty has been building up her fatty liver and/or diabetes for years. Then something (fast, infection, getting shooed, whatever) trips her metabolism over into terminal stage diabetes. Everything breaks down, FFAs go sky-high, doesn’t help. It may even be that she can’t burn FFA any longer because the pyruvate is messed up, or maybe even making insulin fails because of lack of amino acids. Liver frantically making ketones before it dies, kitty feels like dying, which she is doing, stops eating (ever had pancreatitis or really bad hangover?) The end.
Hey, if low fat works for humans it should work for dogs. And in fact, it doth work just as well for dogs as it does for humans.
Indeed.
The dogs and cats owners know well already that a low-fat food should turn a fat body into a lean one. We are what we eat, right? So fat cats and dogs are fed by mostly plants with clever flavors to simulate the taste of meat. Most people somehow absolutely can’t see any connection between a low fat food and high fat bellies, instead they believe in the logic of advertisers and various professionals, it is generally more convincing than even personal observations. Recently my acquaintance complained to me that it was getting hard to wash her dog because it included lifting the dog into a bath tub. The dog is approaching steadily a 50 lb mark after being switched on an old dogs dry food. Dog is also developing a cataract and a joint problem due to a weight increase. I asked that nice lady, why not to switch back to the old food, or even better a young dogs food or even the one for cats(she also feeds a stray cat from her patio and buys a cat food anyway)? She can’t spend too much money and time on feeding her dog according to a paleo style (she works two minimal wage jobs), and convenience and cost could be important factors for an owner. She is a very disciplined and order-lowing person, so my suggestions sounded logical but bizarre and uncomfortable for her.
Did you explain to him that it’s not what he’s eating, but what’s eating him? Did you remind him that no pea powder tastes as good as being sleek and shiny feels? These are considerations, Tom, and I fear you’re making sport of a grave situation. Be advised, further, that should you continue to bully him because he doesn’t fit into society’s idea of how a cis-feline should comport himself, you risk alienating him. This leads to secret eating. Have you checked the bottom of the closet for empty packets of pearled barley?
I was thinking of hanging a FAT KITTENS BECOME FAT CATS poster over his dish. That technique has worked so well in schools.
You went on a low-carb cruise and had to feed your carnivore cat carbs to do it :-).
Yeah, the irony isn’t lost on me. Trouble is, cats are lousy at opening cans, so we had to leave out the dry stuff.
Perhaps mix some taurine into the dry stuff, or hire someone to feed the cats, they don’t have to be feed every day, afterall. They’re predators. in fact intermittent fasting would probably be very good for them.
I still want to train Rascal to open his own can.
Perhaps an occasional fattening for one week in a year fits perfectly into a paleo life-style. The cat is not in a modeling business after all, and diabetes development should take longer than a week . The perfect paleo solution would be a healthy mice population in your house, but Chareva may object.
Perhaps you can train your cat to open his/her own can of cat food. I suppose you just need to make sure he/she opens the right can and not the stuff he/she hides in the closet…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idq-pFZ9D1Q
One thing that always surprised me about these cowboys…
Macronutrients are meaningless… Unless it’s fat.
It’s wrong to exclude whole food groups… Unless it’s meat, organ meat and eggs.
Fiber is the only thing you need for healthy living… Unless it comes from anything other than a grain or legume.
Yep.
It goes to show you can’t judge a book by it’s cover.
Just because the packet says “Cat Food” doesn’t mean it really is. Mice and small birds : the real Cat Food.
There’s a lesson there for everything.
He has treated himself to a couple of mice.
Tom – Our cat used to treat dry food like crack – he was addicted to it and seemed to be starving all of the time. He was up to 22lbs and the vet wanted him down to about 15 (he was a large cat anyway). When we got our dog I decided she was going to be on a raw meat and bones diet and tried converting the cat at that point but he would not have it – he was already 7 years old and set in his ways. I did convert him to wet canned, meat based cat food and low and behold he got down to his 15lbs with no more early morning walking on the head waiting for food !!! LOL
BTW – it’s been 8 years now and the dog is still on raw meat and bones, she loves it – never had a health issue.
Our dogs are on raw meat and bones as well. They’re strong, energetic, and don’t have “doggy breath” or tartar on their teeth.
I’ve heard and read that cats can become junk food junkies, just like people.
Some years ago, when I was dealing with sick cats, I did some checking. According to the catkins sites I went to, cats should be on less than 10% carbs. I also came across a quick way of finding the carb amounts in food. Its not absolute, but close enough to give me an idea. Add up all the nutrient content amounts, moisture, ash, protein, so forth, subtract that number from 100. That’s a shocking surprise in some cases.
The dry-food makers gave us the impression we were looking at meaty stuff by making chicken the #1 ingredient. All that means is that there’s more chicken than the next ingredient. Those other ingredients apparently add up to high-carb, low-protein food.
My late ginger cat, Jack, developed an overactive thyroid when he was around ten years old, and literally became a skeleton with fur on, despite the fact that he ate voraciously, and always tried to eat my other cat’s food as well as his own. I always fed them a mixture of canned cat food or the pouches, and dry food. My vet told me that he and a number of his vet colleagues were working very hard on a paper to show that commercially-produced cat foods (in the UK at least) are the reason why the incidence of cat hyperthyroidism is spiralling out of control – it was virtually unheard of twenty five or so years ago. I have since examined the content of both canned food and pouches, and in the majority of cases, within the well known British brands, the usual percentage of actual meat or fish content is only 4%. The rest is made up of who knows what? I really get cross when I go and buy my remaining cat’s biscuits and find that most brands insist on adding vegetables – to the best of my knowledge, cats have never cultivated or harvested vegetables to eat – my cat very carefully eats around the green-coloured biscuits! My cat is now 19 years old, and in good condition, thankfully, but I do think that animal food has headed in the same direction as human food. Can you believe that Bakers have actually brought out a low-fat dog food in the UK? I found myself shouting at the TV when I saw the ad for the first time! What the……???
Low-fat dog food? Head. Bang. On. Desk.
Well, there is special cat food for diabetic kitties. At least one brand I remember had significant amounts of carbs in it
(remember, this is prescription or “health” food, price*=3..7)
Related, did you ever hear of “feline hepatic lipidosis” aka “fat mobilization syndrome”? The official stance is that “suddenly”, kitty stops eating. This means the fat gets mobilised (oh no!), “processed by the liver” (wait, what? What’s to process about the FFAs the adipocytes release? Did they mean, making ketone bodies?) but “unfortunately the liver is bad at metabolizing fat” (say what? In obligate carnivore? You gotta be kidding me) so all that fat sticks in the art- I mean, in the liver (kitty acquiring a fatty liver in a week with no fats input???), and kitti has meowed for the last time. Well, poor kitty.
Peter will know best, but may I suggest an alternative pathogenesis for that? Poor kitty has been building up her fatty liver and/or diabetes for years. Then something (fast, infection, getting shooed, whatever) trips her metabolism over into terminal stage diabetes. Everything breaks down, FFAs go sky-high, doesn’t help. It may even be that she can’t burn FFA any longer because the pyruvate is messed up, or maybe even making insulin fails because of lack of amino acids. Liver frantically making ketones before it dies, kitty feels like dying, which she is doing, stops eating (ever had pancreatitis or really bad hangover?) The end.
Hey, if low fat works for humans it should work for dogs. And in fact, it doth work just as well for dogs as it does for humans.
Indeed.
The dogs and cats owners know well already that a low-fat food should turn a fat body into a lean one. We are what we eat, right? So fat cats and dogs are fed by mostly plants with clever flavors to simulate the taste of meat. Most people somehow absolutely can’t see any connection between a low fat food and high fat bellies, instead they believe in the logic of advertisers and various professionals, it is generally more convincing than even personal observations. Recently my acquaintance complained to me that it was getting hard to wash her dog because it included lifting the dog into a bath tub. The dog is approaching steadily a 50 lb mark after being switched on an old dogs dry food. Dog is also developing a cataract and a joint problem due to a weight increase. I asked that nice lady, why not to switch back to the old food, or even better a young dogs food or even the one for cats(she also feeds a stray cat from her patio and buys a cat food anyway)? She can’t spend too much money and time on feeding her dog according to a paleo style (she works two minimal wage jobs), and convenience and cost could be important factors for an owner. She is a very disciplined and order-lowing person, so my suggestions sounded logical but bizarre and uncomfortable for her.
Did you explain to him that it’s not what he’s eating, but what’s eating him? Did you remind him that no pea powder tastes as good as being sleek and shiny feels? These are considerations, Tom, and I fear you’re making sport of a grave situation. Be advised, further, that should you continue to bully him because he doesn’t fit into society’s idea of how a cis-feline should comport himself, you risk alienating him. This leads to secret eating. Have you checked the bottom of the closet for empty packets of pearled barley?
I was thinking of hanging a FAT KITTENS BECOME FAT CATS poster over his dish. That technique has worked so well in schools.
I feed my cats a raw meat diet now. They are getting sleek and their coats are shiny. Even Teddy, who has issues. He apparently was sensitive to any grains. I transitioned them to wet cat food, then moved to a grind that has the right proportion of muscle meat to bone and organs. It has the texture of canned. Now they are also getting chicken gizzards and cut up chicken. They LOVE the gizzards.
Don’t you feed the dogs a raw diet? If so, why not do the same for Little Man?
He might like a raw-food grind. I don’t think he’s capable of tearing up the whole chicken legs and thighs the dogs regularly devour.
No, but he sure can eat chicken rib meat, and gnaw on the thigh bones. My feral colony leaves the big bones, but they are picked clean. Don’t forget the liver and other organs. The ratio (for both cats and dogs) is 80% muscle meat (and heart and gizzard count as muscle), 10% bone, 10% organ (of which at least 5% should be liver). I buy my ground mix from Hare Today. Too much bone in some of the mixes (like the poultry), but I also thin it out with water and eggs.
You went on a low-carb cruise and had to feed your carnivore cat carbs to do it :-).
Yeah, the irony isn’t lost on me. Trouble is, cats are lousy at opening cans, so we had to leave out the dry stuff.
Perhaps mix some taurine into the dry stuff, or hire someone to feed the cats, they don’t have to be feed every day, afterall. They’re predators. in fact intermittent fasting would probably be very good for them.
I still want to train Rascal to open his own can.
Perhaps an occasional fattening for one week in a year fits perfectly into a paleo life-style. The cat is not in a modeling business after all, and diabetes development should take longer than a week . The perfect paleo solution would be a healthy mice population in your house, but Chareva may object.
Object or not, we get mice in the house now and then. I once trapped several them in one night — pre-Rascal, of course.
Perhaps you can train your cat to open his/her own can of cat food. I suppose you just need to make sure he/she opens the right can and not the stuff he/she hides in the closet…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idq-pFZ9D1Q
One thing that always surprised me about these cowboys…
Macronutrients are meaningless… Unless it’s fat.
It’s wrong to exclude whole food groups… Unless it’s meat, organ meat and eggs.
Fiber is the only thing you need for healthy living… Unless it comes from anything other than a grain or legume.
Yep.
But Tom.
How can this really mean anything when the animal is domesticated and fed, essentially, what amounts to a 100% processed food diet. So really, carbs is the BIG variable, and not the fact that the animal is in a zoo (though I’m quite certain you’re the best zookeeper Earth has to offer)?
Down here in Baja, basically all people’s cats are free to come and go as they please, and some of the Toms (har har) roam around for days between homestead visits. They even kill rattlesnakes. Lizards for sure. The occasional bird, but more cacti than tree around here, so less to climb and lie in weight for.
Point is, if the cat lived that kinda life and someone like me set out cat food every day for ad libitum feral cat feeding, do you seriously think the neighborhood would be bristling with fat cats?
I think it would depend on how the food you set out affected the cat’s metabolism and tendency to partition calories into fat cells. Rascal always eats ad libitum because we always fill his food dish when it’s empty. But eating as his appetite dictates, he gets fat on the dry stuff but not on the meaty stuff — and that’s the only variable being changed in his case. (Although if he’d kill snakes for us, I’d be quite happy with that result.)
How to tell carbs in cat food……look at guaranteed analysis. Example of ours.
dry food:
crude protein 45%
crude fat 18%
crude fiber 4%
moisture 10%
=77%
100% – 77% = 23% carbs
This is our cats “candy” he gets a small handful every other day and gobbles it up.
His wet food:
crude protein 10%
crude fat 2.5%
cruse fiber 1.5%
moisture 80%
ash 3.5%
=97.5%
100% – 97.5% = 2.5% carbs
This is his main diet.
We also sometimes put a little coconut oil in there as well (very small amount less than 1/4 tsp) and he is shiny, soft, energetic and used to be fat before we figured this out. Unfortunatly for our other cat who died of heart disease we were too late.
I feed my cats a raw meat diet now. They are getting sleek and their coats are shiny. Even Teddy, who has issues. He apparently was sensitive to any grains. I transitioned them to wet cat food, then moved to a grind that has the right proportion of muscle meat to bone and organs. It has the texture of canned. Now they are also getting chicken gizzards and cut up chicken. They LOVE the gizzards.
Don’t you feed the dogs a raw diet? If so, why not do the same for Little Man?
He might like a raw-food grind. I don’t think he’s capable of tearing up the whole chicken legs and thighs the dogs regularly devour.
No, but he sure can eat chicken rib meat, and gnaw on the thigh bones. My feral colony leaves the big bones, but they are picked clean. Don’t forget the liver and other organs. The ratio (for both cats and dogs) is 80% muscle meat (and heart and gizzard count as muscle), 10% bone, 10% organ (of which at least 5% should be liver). I buy my ground mix from Hare Today. Too much bone in some of the mixes (like the poultry), but I also thin it out with water and eggs.
Just wanted to mention – my dog absolutely loves his meat and bones; I use MyPetCarnivore, and for you, Tom, they do a monthly drop-off in Nashville… https://www.mypetcarnivore.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=129&Itemid=350&lang=en
🙂
Nice. I’ll pass it on to the head cook/dog chef.
But Tom.
How can this really mean anything when the animal is domesticated and fed, essentially, what amounts to a 100% processed food diet. So really, carbs is the BIG variable, and not the fact that the animal is in a zoo (though I’m quite certain you’re the best zookeeper Earth has to offer)?
Down here in Baja, basically all people’s cats are free to come and go as they please, and some of the Toms (har har) roam around for days between homestead visits. They even kill rattlesnakes. Lizards for sure. The occasional bird, but more cacti than tree around here, so less to climb and lie in weight for.
Point is, if the cat lived that kinda life and someone like me set out cat food every day for ad libitum feral cat feeding, do you seriously think the neighborhood would be bristling with fat cats?
I think it would depend on how the food you set out affected the cat’s metabolism and tendency to partition calories into fat cells. Rascal always eats ad libitum because we always fill his food dish when it’s empty. But eating as his appetite dictates, he gets fat on the dry stuff but not on the meaty stuff — and that’s the only variable being changed in his case. (Although if he’d kill snakes for us, I’d be quite happy with that result.)
How to tell carbs in cat food……look at guaranteed analysis. Example of ours.
dry food:
crude protein 45%
crude fat 18%
crude fiber 4%
moisture 10%
=77%
100% – 77% = 23% carbs
This is our cats “candy” he gets a small handful every other day and gobbles it up.
His wet food:
crude protein 10%
crude fat 2.5%
cruse fiber 1.5%
moisture 80%
ash 3.5%
=97.5%
100% – 97.5% = 2.5% carbs
This is his main diet.
We also sometimes put a little coconut oil in there as well (very small amount less than 1/4 tsp) and he is shiny, soft, energetic and used to be fat before we figured this out. Unfortunatly for our other cat who died of heart disease we were too late.
That’s the way for a cat to acquire you. Cat choose you. Remember dogs have masters, but cats have staff.
Indeed. Rascal assigned me the role of sparring partner and occasional nap-lap.
I’ve seen cats and dogs chase squirrels and birds but for some reason they leave gardens alone.
I’ll pluck some peas from the garden and see if Rascal shows any interest in them. My guess is he won’t.
Our family cat when i was a child, would gleefully eat corn off the cob. I don’t remember if he would actually take down a stalk, but if offered would gladly accept.
Tom,
I’ve got a fatty feline I’d like to get slimmed down. The cat food closest to 100% meat that I found had some potato starch in it, that shouldn’t count as carbs, should it? Do cats have trouble with their gut buddies?
I don’t know if raw potato starch would count as carbs for a cat or not. On the other hand, I can’t imagine cats eating potatoes.
We had a cat that loved eating raw potato peelings. It would beg for them while we were peeling potatoes and eat as many as it could get.
I’m really late to the party but in my opinion if it’s uncooked starch (which all potato starch is, right?) then it’s technically inedible fiber. Except that some bacteria in your cat’s large intestines will eat it and generate short-chain fatty acids, turning it into small amounts of delicious fats.
So it’s probably ok; the only real risk is large bowel bacteria overgrowth that can creep over to small intestine but that’s unlikely as it’s a small amount and your carnivorous cat probably has a very short large intestine just meant for other things like removing water from poo and absorbing B12. Plus there’s a valve that keeps out large intestine bacteria.
That’s the way for a cat to acquire you. Cat choose you. Remember dogs have masters, but cats have staff.
Indeed. Rascal assigned me the role of sparring partner and occasional nap-lap.