{"id":8098,"date":"2015-06-08T17:33:19","date_gmt":"2015-06-08T23:33:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/?p=8098"},"modified":"2015-06-08T23:23:21","modified_gmt":"2015-06-09T05:23:21","slug":"lessons-from-a-fat-cat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/2015\/06\/08\/lessons-from-a-fat-cat\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons From A Fat Cat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our cat\u2019s official name is Rascal, but we usually refer to him as Little Man<\/em>. I gave him that name at some point after his successful campaign to convert me into a person who likes cats \u2013 at least one cat, anyway.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m pretty sure after he joined the family two years ago, he evaluated us all and figured out I was the only one who wasn\u2019t delighted by his presence. Okay,<\/em> he said to himself, I\u2019ll work on him<\/em>. He took to jumping on my lap when I was watching TV late at night \u2013 which scared me out of my skin the first few times \u2013 and settling down for a long purr.<\/p>\n

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!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/strong>
\n(Little Man playing En Garde, Mister! with my hand.)<\/em><\/p>\n

A couple of months before the cruise, Little Man and I were engaged in a spirited round of En Garde, Mister!<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

What the \u2026?<\/em><\/p>\n

Little Man had become Tubby Man.<\/p>\n

Up until a month or two earlier, he\u2019d been living on canned cat food that\u2019s primarily meat and organ meat. There\u2019s rice in some of the flavors, but not much. For variety, Chareva also fed him sardines, mackerel and tuna.<\/p>\n

Then she found a brand of dry cat food that brags No Corn, Wheat or Soy, No Artificial Colors, Flavors or Ingredients<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s good. The next three ingredients are pea powder, barley and brown rice. Well, I wouldn\u2019t call those bad, but it\u2019s clear the dry cat food is considerably more carb-laden than the canned stuff.<\/p>\n

I wondered to myself, Did Little Man become Tubby Man because we inadvertently jacked up the carbohydrate content of his diet?<\/em><\/p>\n

Naaaawww, that can\u2019t 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\u2019s because you eat too @#$%<\/em>ing much, too @#$%<\/em>ing often, period. It\u2019s a simple matter of ingesting too many calories.<\/p>\n

Therefore, it was obvious that our Little Man \u2013 who for nearly two years had exercised the willpower to limit his calories and maintained a sleek, feline body as a result \u2013 was developing a serious flaw in his character. He\u2019d become a glutton without any of us noticing until it was too late. I don\u2019t track his daily activity, but I\u2019ll bet he was also getting lazy and moving less \u2026 fewer unexplained mad-dashes around the house and across the top of all the furniture, perhaps.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s also dropped by a couple of times to check on him after feeding our chickens.<\/p>\n

Well, wouldn\u2019t you know it \u2026 when we returned home eight days later, Little Man was turning into Tubby Man again. I\u2019m not going to chalk it up to a character flaw, since he\u2019d 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, \u201cShe isn\u2019t really craving food; she\u2019s craving love.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

But we\u2019ve been back for more than a week, and he\u2019s not engaging in emotional over-eating anymore. He\u2019s even trimmed down noticeably. It has to be because he feels loved and supported again now that we\u2019re home. It can\u2019t have anything to do with the fact that he\u2019s back to a meat-and-fish diet \u2026 because as legions of internet cowboys have assured me, macronutrient ratios don\u2019t have anything to do with gaining or losing weight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our cat\u2019s 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… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8098"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8113,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8098\/revisions\/8113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}