Indy is... fat! He's a apple-head Siamese should probably be around 10-12 pounds, but he shot up to 16 pounds on the mostly dry-food diet I had been feeding him. On his boxy little frame he looked like a beach ball.

I'd heard a little about feeding cats raw meat, investigated on the Internet and started Indy on his new diet. He seems to like it and he has dropped about 1.5 pounds so far. Proportionally, that's almost 10% of his weight. That would be about 18 pounds on me. I think we've been doing it about 2-3 months so far.

What a trooper! Maybe I should race him, see which of us gets to our goal first. Lets see, he weights 14.5 pounds now and I figure he'd be looking good at 12. That's almost another 2 pounds which is about 15% of his current body weight.

15% of my current body weight is 27 pounds.

Somehow I think my cat is going to win this race!

(oops, wrong general forum, meant to post in General Lowcarb)

Good for you...and better for your cat! Cats are meant to eat meat not cereal! Try to give him a little fish and organ meats from time to time. Don't stick to just one meat or he might miss some vital nutrient. In the wild he would eat mice and birds - all of them - not just the lean meaty bits.

I give him a cat vitamin and stir in a variety of meats into his mixture, as well as some psysillium fiber. Just to cover all the bases.

Man, poor kitty sure needs to take off the pounds. He's getting arthritic. I can hear his joints clicking when he walks.

What kind of meats do you give him and do you cook it first? My two cats are SOOO tubby!

No, you really don't want to cook the meat because it destroys the taurine which is an essential amino acid for them. They'll eventually die if they don't get it. I think most cat foods add it in after the cooking.

I grind or chop up chicken thighs, turkey meat, ground beef. Give occassional tuna. Some people are fanatically against giving cats tuna, but from what I've read, it is fine as long as it isn't their entire diet.

For supplements I have tried adding my own vitamins, like vit E, but they get turned off to the taste. So I found some cat vitamins at my pet store and I'm giving them that.

There's people that grind up the bones too, they call it BARF (bones and raw food). However, you need to be around when you pet is eating it in case they choke on a bone. Anyway, the bones are good for their gums (to chew on) and gives them calcium.

My grinder wouldn't handle the bones so we skip that and I powder up one of my calcium pills for them and mix it into their food. I give them largish chunks of chicken periodically so they have to chew it like crazy. Hope that gives them a good gum work-out.

We put our chubby cat on a diet. Not realizing she had been eating so much of the other cats food, the change in calories was more drastic than we had anticipated. Her body shut down, and she became diabetic.

Cats don't know how to explain how they feel, which makes it difficult to gauge when making a dietary change. Yes, your cat will be healthier if you can reduce his/her weight, but please be careful. Giving insulin shots to a cat twice a day is not pleasurable (especially for the cat). A very gradual change in diet is probably best. I would check with the vet for recommendations first.

Hills now makes a low-carb cat food, Prescription m/d

http://www.hillspet.com/index.jsp

Since I have 9 cats, doing the raw diet thing is unrealistic for me, but I'm thinking of starting my fat cat Stinky on the m/d. He's been on a premium "diet" food for a while now, with poor results. He's had bloodwork, not diabetic or anything....so I'm thinking of giving the low-carb food a try with him. After all, low-carb worked for me!

My cats are HUGE...This has given me incentive to switch their diets!!

I use Prescription diet ,one cat is on KD for his kidneys and the other one is on Seniors. This food is only available at the Vet Clinic, and my cats are in excellent health.

My cat can't digest magnesium and is already on a special food. =/

raw meat? or cooked? I would think feeding him raw meat would be dangerous?

Doreen’s journal has info on raw food for cats. She is studying Cat Nutrition.

Raw meat is what cats normally eat. They've got much different digestive tracts than we humans do. They're far shorter so they aren't susceptible to food poisoning like we are.

That's good to know about Perscription Diet. I might start getting that. Annoying you need a perscription for it though!

How do you manage to feed your cats two different kinds of food? I've had a cat on a special diet and fat kitty would go wolf his food and sick kitty would go eat the other cats food! If I tried to separate them at meal time they get upset and yowl and refuse to eat!

Here's a link on Raw Food diet for cats. Try doing a search on "low carb cat food" on Google and see what you find.

http://www.lowcarbluxury.com/atkins-cats.html

Isn't it annoying they don't put the carb, fiber, protein and fat breakdown on the sides of animal food?

I switched to Eukanuba because the first four ingredients are meat, and my cat with the sensitive tummy stopped throwing up all the time.
Another good thing for them is kitty grass, basically oat grass and a few other things that I grow in a pot on the windowsill. If they don't go outside, they don't get to eat this kind of thing.

While I was researching this I read about the fatty liver syndrome that sounds like your cat has. The advise I got on avoiding that is to make sure your pet is eating plenty. If they go into starvation mode it can bring this one, if your pet was overweight.

Well, my fat, but growing slimmer kitty, is eating quite a lot. Although just like with me on my lowcarb diet, his appetite seems to be shrinking a bit now that he is a few months into it. So I don't think he is in any danger of having that happen.

Diabetes... well, I can't help but think feeding a cat a high carb diet, which is totally unnatural for them, is going to play havoc with their insulin and glucose. I think my chubby cat was probably going to end up diabetic too. Hopefully this will prevent that from happening.

BTW: Lots of great info at this site, but you have to have a Yahoo account to get in: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RawCats/