Week 10: A three-pronged plan

So here’s the plan:

Prong 1: More meals.

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.

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