Two out of three pumpkin heads agree

Adding pumpkin to their food is helping with the weight control:

This is GREAT progress. Between the Science Diet Lite (thank you, Jeanne!) and the pumpkin, they are drifting down to good, healthy weights.

Pumpkin heads

Last year, Eddie (he whose picture is at the top of this blog) suffered a blow out of epic proportions. Seems one of his anal glands got massively impacted with disgusting solid stuff, developed an infection and then blew up like a volcano. He showed no symptoms before the blow out, so we had no idea until we saw the gaping wound. In fact, I didn’t realize that cats could even have this problem. I thought it was strictly a dog thing. That was an expensive lesson to learn. He needed to be sedated to have the wound treated, and then needed a long term antibiotic plus the donut of shame. We endured non-stop hissing from Wally that lasted for nearly a month and poor Eddie was horribly traumatized by the entire event.

This year, not to be too graphic, his butt started smelling weird. Yes, I know, animal butts and butts in general don’t smell good but his smelled weird. When I’d pet him along his spine, I’d get to the tops of his legs below his tail and I could feel big solid things in there. They seemed to be the size of big acorns and when I’d squeeze, I’d smell more of the weirdness. As was the case last year, though, he had no other symptoms – he never dragged his butt on the carpet or anything. Still, just to be safe, I took him to the vet.

I am so glad I did. Once again, both glands were horribly impacted. The vet told me that the stuff she got out of there was almost entire solid, so I’m sure the poor cat was in pain. She gave him a shot each of antibiotics and steroids, because she knew there was no way we could get pills down that cat. I’ve given pills to plenty of cats before but Eddie is not only large, he’s quite strong. When he doesn’t want something, well it’s just not going to happen.

She also suggested getting more fiber into his diet. She gave me a couple of cans of prescription fiber food to get us started. In the meantime, I asked around my friends for advice – I’ve got some animal experts among my friends and the suggestion that came up over and over again was to add some canned pumpkin to his diet.

Folks, the cat loves his pumpkin. In fact, all three of them love it. I stir it into their canned food and they eat every bit of it. This week, Kent tried an experiment and just stuck a dollop in each bowl next to the canned food. It was all gone, as though they'd used a vacuum on it.

Sadly, we aren’t yet seeing any change in Eddie’s weight. Chloe and Wally have drifted ever so slightly down but my fat boy is growing ever larger and more in charge. As long as his glands stay clear, I guess I’ll have to be happy with that.

Kitty weigh-in

Well there's no good progress to report. They are either holding steady at their weights (which the vet said ought to come down) or in the case of Eddie, just outright gaining.

Well this is depressing

The cats are not losing weight. If anything, they are gaining. On the plus side, their super duper expensive food has resulted in less poo in the box. That's always a good thing. But it hasn't resulted in less cat girth.

Here are their results to date:

I'm pretty much stumped at this point. We're trying to do the right thing by our cats' health but clearly this isn't working.

Maybe it's a plateau

Do cats hit dieting plateaus also? That's the only explanation I have for the cats' current weights.

• Eddie: 17.4 (same from end of July, down .4 from two weeks ago)
• Wally: 14.8 (UP .3 from the end of July and worse yet, up .4 from two weeks ago)
• Chloe: 11.6 (same story, up .2 from the end of July and two weeks ago)

So cats are whining for no good reason other than they don't like the new dry food.

Fat cats are fat

Eddie doesn't like the diet

At last month's vet check up, the vet mentioned that in addition to the kitties being awfully high strung and maybe next time we sedate them before bringing them in, they're all three on the chubby side and perhaps it's time to lose weight.

Well, the vet is right and I'm sure it's partly because we have no stairs for them to race up and down upon here at The Little Yellow House. Stairs made for a nice easy way to reduce kitty stress and manage kitty weight, but we live in a ranch home now.

Being the dutiful cat owners that we are, we researched good options for calorie restrictions, including a couple of Ikea cat feeder hacks (here and here). This is more difficult than it might seem, not because they whine (they've always whined for food daily anyway) but because of their individual eating patterns.

Wally and Chloe are both nibblers or grazers. They'll eat three or four pieces of kibble and then be done for an hour or so. If they were the only two cats we had, we could get by with a cat sitter every other day when we go out of town since they eat when they're hungry and stop when they're not.

But Eddie doesn't work that way. Eddie is a scarf 'n' barf kind of cat. He will eat and eat and eat, sometimes to the point of tossing his cookies er kibble immediately afterward. If we put out enough food for three days on the first day, it would be all gone at the end of the first day. Plus he'd probably barf.

So those feeding differences meant we needed to find a reduced calorie kibble and also feed less of it just a bit more frequently. Previously, I just kept the bowls topped off. Now I put 1/3 cup very high quality (also expensive) diet kibble in each of the two bowls in the morning and then again at night. Theoretically that should help them lose weight because it's fewer calories and less food.

But theory and reality aren't yet lined up with the Meoinkers. As of two weeks ago and 21 days into the calorie reduction, Wally and Chloe have maintained their weight while dramatically increasing their food whining. Eddie, on the other hand, has gained weight.

We'll have another kitty weigh in this weekend. I'll let you know what the scales say. Kitties may need to get FitBits (KitBits?) of their own and start logging 10k steps a day.