Last weekend, Juniper finally finished off that 20 lb. bag of Science Diet Light, which meant it was time for another weigh-in. After nearly 6 months on the light food, Juniper’s weight has not changed to any degree discernable by the bathroom scale – she’s still coming in at 11 lbs.
I on the other hand have gained back that 4 lbs. I’d lost in April. I think that kind of fluctuation is normal, but it may also point to a certain degree of imprecision in the bathroom scale, so let’s consider the anecdotal evidence. Over the past few months Matthew and I have occasionally looked at Juniper in a certain pose and said, “I think she’s losing weight. She looks slimmer, right?” But the truth is, I think this has more to do with our obsessive contemplation of her figure, and wishful thinking, than with any sustained or measurable progress. But let’s see what you think!
To make up for the past few months’ Juniper hiatus, I present a short(ish) photo essay of what you’ve missed. It’s getting harder to photograph her since she’s figured out that it’s the camera making that annoying bright flash of light. I’ve started trying to capture her in natural light, which also avoids the dreaded demonic flash eye, so apologies for the blurriness in some of these.
May
May 10 - Cat loaf on the couch
This is about when she figured out the flash.
June
June 4 - Cat loaf on the floor
June 7 - A wild turkey, with baby!
No that’s not Juniper, but I couldn’t resist including this. A wild turkey with a baby (look directly to the left of its tail), appeared one morning in our neighbor’s yard. Apparently this is not that rare an occurrence in Somerville. Juniper was nearly as excited as Matthew and me.
June 18 - Cat loaf on the guest bed
June 23 - Starfish paws and tangled legs
There’s also a video of the starfish paws on YouTube, complete with me saying goofy things and generally sounding like an idiot.
July
July 5 - Asleep on her scratchy box
July 11 - In a rare action shot, Juniper walks across the floor
July 26 - Fluffy belly!
July 26 - Disturbed from her nap, Juniper does this
So there you have it! Juniper remains lovely, lazy…and fat, no?
The big news is that she’s on new food now, which I’m pretty excited to tell you about, but I’ll save that for another post. Try to contain your excitement!
So I know I’m a little late to the dance on this one, but man, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is really good (and fascinating and eye-opening and gross and troubling). I’ve just started Part 2 and I kind of really really want to start a farm…or maybe just shop more at farmer’s markets.
What this has to do with Junie is this: after reading about the nasty health effects on cows of a grain-based feedlot diet, which they are not evolved to digest, I’ve started reconsidering the validity of thesewebsites that I came across while researching cat diet strategies a couple weeks ago. The basic argument is that cats are obligate carnivores — evolved to need meat — and that they are healthiest on the diet they evolved to eat: high in animal protein and fat, low in carbs, high in moisture. According to the authors of these sites, canned food is better than dry (which contains a bunch of grain), and real raw meat is best of all. Initially, I had dismissed all this as a little nuts — only crazy people make their pets’ food from scratch, right? — but on second thought (and considered in the context of ugly truths about the human food industry) I have to admit the argument is compelling.
No Junie, you're a carnivore!
One site singles out Junie’s food, Hill’s Science Diet, specifically (even their canned stuff), and “Light” cat food in general (which contains less fat, and therefore more carbs), as being bad news. My vet recommends (and sells) Hill’s, and the woman who was fostering Junie used it too. I’ve blithely assumed that since it’s even more expensive than the premium grocery store brand I’d been feeding Faith, it had to be good — I mean, it has “Science” right in the name, dammit! Then again, science keeps getting the diet thing wrong for humans. Given how poor a job we do of feeding ourselves – valuing convenience and cost over health and common sense — it’s pretty plausible, even likely, that we’re feeding our pets the wrong thing too, especially when you consider that we’re making pet food out of cheap subsidized grain and animal by-products deemed unfit for human consumption.
But could I really feed Juniper a raw meat diet? Even if I was certain it was the right thing, the work involved (buying/grinding/portioning/freezing/thawing) seems pretty overwhelming. Some nights I can barely feed myself. And then there’s the question of what meat to feed her. If I buy $.99/lb. chicken from Stop & Shop I’ll be disappointing Michael Pollan, but I can’t afford to feed her from my meat CSA. (Of course processed cat food — dry or canned — doesn’t eliminate that issue, just masks it by disguising the industrial meat — or meat by-products — behind a pretty label.)
The proponents of raw meat don’t always agree among themselves — this vet grinds the meat and adds supplements (check out the awesome photo towards the end of the page), while this woman is staunchly opposed to grinding and feeds her cats whole chunks of raw animal. Both, however, reference the mouse as the platonic ideal of cat food. Mostly to tease Matthew, I briefly (okay for like two minutes) entertained the idea of raising mice (on surplus corn of course), then setting them loose one at a time for Junie’s dinner. The exercise would be built right in! Fortunately for Matthew, the problems with factory farming mice in the guest room became apparent pretty quickly — for one thing, think how much mouse poop that would generate! But you know where mice are a “naturally” occurring part of the food chain? That’s right, a farm. Seriously, would anyone buy a farm with me?
Pastoral fantasies aside, I think I want to take a closer look at what Junie’s eating, and consider switching to some ungodly expensive grain-free canned food. If anyone’s done any research into this topic, I’d love to hear what you learned or concluded.
My friend Arvi recently adopted a slightly chubby cat from an acquaintance, who told him that feeding more frequent meals is supposed to help cats lose weight. My extremely cursory internet search to verify this information turned up nothing, but it sounds plausible. Eating frequent small meals is supposed to help humans lose weight (something about metabolism?), so I assume it makes sense for cats too. Has anyone heard this before?
Junie’s now getting 3 meals a day instead of 2 — one when I wake up, one when I get home from work, and one right before I go to bed. I’ve been doing this for a couple weeks and she doesn’t seem to mind. She probably feels like she’s getting more food, but she’s wrong.
Dinner time!
Prong 2: Less food.
The feeding chart on the side of the bag of Hill’s Science Diet regular adult indoor says to feed a 10 lb. cat 3/4 of a cup for weight maintenance, and 2/3 of a cup for weight loss. When I switched over to the Light food I continued feeding Junie 2/3 of a cup without really thinking about it. But if you remember my first post, in which I compared kibble sizes, you might begin to see a problem here: the smaller size of the new kibble means, I think, that more of it can fit in 2/3 of a cup (Matthew tells me this is called packing efficiency — thanks Matthew!). I checked the Light bag the other day, and sure enough, it says to feed a 10 lb. cat just 1/2 of a cup for weight loss.
(A skeptic might argue that Hill’s recommends feeding less of the Light because they know people who buy it are concerned about their cats’ weight, and want to see quick results. If you know me at all, you know that I very much want to weigh a cup of regular and a cup of light and see what the difference is, but unfortunately I don’t have any regular food left. If any of my reader use it and want to loan me a cup, let me know!)
Trusting Hill’s for now, I’ve switched to 1/2 of a cup a day, meaning 1/6 of a cup three times a day, or as close to it as I can get with a 1/3 cup measuring cup. I was already doing 1/6 of a cup for the two evening meals, but now her morning meal is 1/6 as well, instead of 1/3. Again, she seems okay with it — she reminds me when it’s time to eat, but she doesn’t complain afterward like she’s still hungry.
Prong 3: Exercise.
Junie’s about three, and still pretty playful. She loves chasing toy mice across our hardwood floors, batting them around like a furry little soccer player. She loves chasing her tail around table legs — the way she does it is hard to describe but pretty much the funniest thing I’ve ever seen — I’ll try to capture it on film for you some time.
The issue with toy mice is that she loses them under the couch almost as soon as she starts playing with them. Every few days I have to get down there with my Maglite (purchased specifically for this purpose), and fish them out with a ruler. (One day last summer I found, amongst the toy mice and balls, a plum tomato that had gone mysteriously missing from the kitchen counter a few days earlier!) So even if I leave her a few toy mice in the morning, I think she loses them before getting much aerobic benefit from the chase.
Interactive toys — where I wave something around — are another story. As Laura loves to recount, at one point in college I decided to put Faith on an exercise program which consisted of me running back and forth from the living room to the kitchen dragging a string. Faith basically ignored me, which meant it was really more of a workout for me, and it didn’t last long. Fortunately for my dignity, this technique is not an option for Juniper, who darts away in fright when you walk calmly past her (she really ought to be getting all the exercise she needs fleeing in terror from us all day long, but apparently not). Anything interactive, then, has to be done with Matthew or me sitting down, which is, conveniently, our favorite thing to do. When I first got Junie, Christine bought her a toy that Matthew dubbed Fishstick, which consisted, yes, of a fish on the end of a stick. Junie LOVED Fishstick, but the elastic string wore out pretty quickly, and for some reason no replacement since has been as compelling for her. But we also get lazy, and don’t wave things around as often as we should. More frequent waving of Fishstick 2 — or the new wand toy I bought yesterday, a sort of tail thing with feathers at the end — is an important part of the exercise plan.
The other part is this (sorry about the soundtrack — we’re watching The Great Debaters):
I spent $20 on that thing, and the first night it was out I found her chasing a frozen pea. She really seems to like vegetables. She’s been playing with the “Cheese Chaser” too though, and if it doesn’t actually provide much exercise, since she can literally do it lying down, at least it keeps her playful. Occasionally she runs to the other side for the ball, or gets over-excited and starts chasing her tail around the table leg. And best of all, she can’t possibly lose it under the couch.
So that’s the plan: more meals, less food, more exercise. Not really rocket science, but hopefully it works, because the next level of this seems to be a homemade raw meat Atkins diet, and I’m not sure I’m up for that. It might be my imagination, but I think she’s looking just a little slimmer in the last week. I’ll try to get some representative photos up soon so you can judge for yourself.
Multiple people (okay, two) have asked me recently how Juniper’s diet is coming. I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted an update, and I do apologize – you must all be dying for news! Well here it is: Juniper is still fat.
Does this windowsill make my butt look big?
Okay, the camera angle in that picture might be a little deceptive, but it was too funny not to share. Look how small her head looks! This next photo, though, is deadly serious:
A cry for help?
We had another weigh-in yesterday, and she’s still right around 11 lbs. There was a momentary hush when Matthew announced that our combined weight was 4 lbs. lighter than last time, but apparently that was all me. To be fair, Juniper may in fact have lost (or gained) a similar percentage of her body weight, but the CVS scale isn’t sensitive enough to detect that.
I have to admit that so far, Junie’s diet is showing a discouraging lack of results, but I’m not giving up. In fact, I have a plan, a plan with multiple (more than two!) prongs. I was going to tell you all about it, but first I have to finish my taxes. Stupid taxes.
Like most cats, Juniper has many names, and answers to none of them. We call her Junie, of course; Junifur, because it’s everywhere; Junipurr, which is really more conceptual, as it sounds exactly the same; Meow, for obvious reasons; Small Round Meow, which sounds like a William Carlos Willams poem, and Old Magoun Saloon-iper, though not very frequently. But her best and most-used names center around her rotund figure, and its similarity to a balloon. Matthew started it, I think, by dubbing her Ballooniper, which has led naturally to June-Balloon, Junie-Balloony, and mostly elegantly, just plain Balloon.
All this to explain why I’m so pained that I didn’t think of this. Brilliant! If we ever have an intervention for Miss Balloon about her weight, one of those will definitely be exhibit A.
This photo is unrelated, other than that it's of Juniper. Maybe she'd give us this look if we had an intervention?
If you’re not a pet owner, you probably stopped reading somewhere around “Small Round Meow”. If you are, don’t mind them, and tell me — what’s the most ridiculous thing you call your cat or dog?
Actually these pictures were taken in Week 3 (last weekend) but I’m not that good at this blogging thing. Sorry!
Anyway, here we have some pictures of Juniper in classic “cat loaf” position, which means sitting/lying upright with all her legs tucked under her. You know, the position that makes you wish you had a glass tabletop… I think this is a good pose in which to document her diet progress, since it’s so standardized. Hopefully a picture of her in cat loaf two months from now will reflect significantly thinner loaf.
So here we go. Cat loaf, from the top:
Cat loaf, from the side:
And most hilariously, cat loaf full frontal, and fully pissed off:
It’s like she knows what these pictures are for. I can’t say I blame her…I’d be pissed too.
Junie’s been curled up charmingly all afternoon on top of the sweaters I left drying on the guest bed, providing me with a rare opportunity to snatch her up for a weighing. Juniper does not like to be picked up. In the interest of journalistic integrity and scientific accuracy, I really should have done this last weekend when I first started her on the light food, but it’s been a busy week and an opportunity this good just hasn’t come up.
The bathroom scale I bought for $5 at CVS — for the express purpose of cat weighing — has a dial so tiny, with hairline pound measures so close to each other, that weighing one’s self, much less a cat, with any precision, is a two-person job. The procedure goes something like this:
Take pictures of unsuspecting cat curled up on bed while warning Matthew, working on computer a few feet away, to be cool
Approach cat slowly, holding one hand out for sniffing, pet reassuringly, then bring second hand swiftly in and lift
Holding struggling cat firmly, step onto scale, then wait while Matthew crouches down to take a reading
Step off scale and repeat, to be sure
Release cat, weigh self, again with Matthew’s help
Subtract weight of self from combined weight of self and cat
The verdict: somewhere in the range of 10.5 to 11 lbs. Like I said, the scale kind of sucks, so this weigh-in thing might not be that viable, especially since we’re only trying to lose a pound or two total. Matthew suggested that since my weight is more likely to fluctuate measurably than hers is, the method was entirely unreliable. I gently explained that we’d be taking the difference every time, so that my weight was irrelevant, and assured him we’d forget he said that. Looks like I lied.
My weight not withstanding, unless I can get my hands on one of those awesome vet scales, we may have to rely instead on circumstantial evidence, such as how funny a meatloaf she makes when she sits with all her feet under her, or how much her belly jiggles when she rolls onto her back to let me pet it. Many pictures will be needed. Time to charge the camera battery!
Juniper is fat. She wears it well, but she can’t deny it, and it’s time to stop pussy-footing around. It’s time for a diet.
When I adopted Juniper last December, her foster mom said she’d been slim when she was rescued, but had put on some weight with her previous foster family because of what she was fed. She assured me that if I fed her high-quality food Junie would drop the pounds in no time. I’ve been shelling out for the Science Diet Indoor ever since, but Junie remains pleasantly plump.
In July when I took her to the vet for the first time, the adorable Dr. Murphy admitted she was a tad chubby, and suggested I try feeding her 10% less. I love you Dr. Murphy, but seriously? 10% less of 1/3 of a cup of kibble is not a practical diet plan. Junie’s been getting a scant third cup twice a day since then, but I can’t detect any difference around her middle.
So I’m taking matters into my own hands. At Petsmart last weekend I bought the 20 lb. bag of Science Diet Light. This week, before the Indoor ran out, I mixed it with some Light to ease her in gently.
The kibble is a drastically different shape and size, which worried me at first, as I’ve dealt with finicky cats in the past. But Junie, bless her heart, doesn’t seem to notice. She’s so good. And fat.
