How Much Canned Food .. Friskie's Special Diet

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Rose

Rose

Member Since 2015
Good morning!

I've been looking all over the place and I've not been able to find anything that tells me how much canned food I should be feeding Zoey. She's 10.5 pounds. I've looked at various spreadsheets and see that people are feeding between 1 and 2.5 cans (or more) a day. I feed her the special diet whitefish or turkey.

Zoey is overweight (big contributor to her dx, I'm sure) and if I fed her to her liking, she would eat 4 cans a day. For the past two days I've been feeding her 1.25 to 1.5 cans and her BG is a lot better than when I was feeding her two cans per day. I am also supplementing with tuna and chicken strips (no breading, cooked in olive oil) for both test time treats and incessant chatter for more food.

Am I starving her with just the 1.25 to 1.5 cans? She seems relaxed most of the time until +8 onward. My goal is to feed little canned food after +5 and convert her to a twice a day feeding. She used to be a free grazing kibble kitty; all things considered, she's doing great on her transition.
 
No need to convert to twice a day feeding; the way Lantus works, mini-meals will match up with the insulin action and help provide a nice smooth curve.
Try adding a tablespoon or two of water to a can, then feeding maybe half at shot time, and half about 3 hours later. A timed feeder like the Pet Safe 5 can help with this, or you can freeze half and put it out to be eaten as it thaws.
My Gracie, on ProZinc, is eating about 1.5 cans of the Friskies Turkey and Giblet twice a day as she needs to gain weight (should be about 11-12 pounds). I let her graze.
Cat Info discusses how to determine the amount to feed under this section on obesity. You want to do it slowly to be safe (reduce the risk of hepatic lipidosis, which can be fatal). You may find that if your cat gets too hungry, she will vomit bile.
 
Rose said:
I am also supplementing with tuna and chicken strips (no breading, cooked in olive oil)
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If you're trying to help Zoey lose weight, try gently poaching the chicken strips in water instead. It's worth keeping the broth, too, to mix into Zoey's food to help fill her up a bit (plus it's good for her urinary tract to drink a little extra). It's tastier than plain water. :)
 
@BJM thank you for the site. I also found the food link by Dr. Pierson and it appears to me that based on the 180 calories for a cat to lose weight, Zoey's 1.25 to 1.5 cans of Special Diet Whitefish or Turkey is a good amount for me to start with. Should be more than 180 calories but much less than what she has been eating. (Unless I'm not calculating that correctly or misinterpreted what I read). When you say you feed your Gracie (I have a Gracie, too) 1.5 cans twice a day, is that 3 cans a day total, or just the 1.5 can divided? I guess if she's a small cat, 1.5 cans divided would still be extra calories to put weight on. I also see that the phosphorus in whitefish is high .. I'm guessing that's not good and probably why FDMB doesn't prefer fish/tuna? It appears that any of the Friskie's Special Diets would be good with the exception of the whitefish and the one with the gravy.

@Critter Mom ... after seeing bjm's calories per gram post i see that olive oil is not a good thing to cook her chicken in. i like your suggestion of keeping the chicken broth and i think i'll take that one step further and just go ahead and cook a whole chicken for her so i'll have the bones broth, too. i'll remove the chicken skin first in an effort to cut the fat.

She's dropping into the blues today so I like the colors that are coming out of the lesser amounts of food, but I hate to think I'm starving her on 1.25 - 1.5 cans a day (with the added protein supplements). My interpretation is that I'm not. There's math involved so I'm putting that out there in case I made a mistake and someone has the thought, as they're reading this, that I did not calculate it all correctly. Please don't let me torture my cat.

Thanks for the postings!
 
Gracie needs to gain some (a largish cat at 10-11 pounds), so yes, it is 1.5 cans twice a day. She doesn't finish all of it, and I put more down than she may eat in case she goes low when I'm not home.

And fish can be problematic due to mineral content and the potential for contributing to renal stone formation.

Pick up a digital baby scale to weigh here weekly. Craigslist and 2nd hand baby supply stores may reduce costs! Also pick up a digital food scale so you can accurately measure what you give. That will let you portion out mini-meals so she doesn't get too hungry at one time. And go slowly with the weight loss. As fat is released for calories, it goes to the liver. Too much fat swells up the liver and causes hepatic lipidosis, which totally mucks up digestion and can be fatal.
 
BJ beat me to it with the digital baby scales suggestion. I got a very reasonably-priced one for Saoirse (ebay) and it has made it a breeze to manage her weight. I started by weighing her, feeding her as normal for several days, recording how much she ate each day, then working out the calories she had consumed. When I weighed her again, I'd either slightly increase or slightly decrease the amount fed for a few days and then weigh her again. It's really helpful to keep a log of the amount fed and calorie intake (see BJ's secondary monitoring tools for more info) not only as a day-to-day guide to feeding, but having the daily journal has proved invaluable as a historical record, especially if one needs to backtrack or see what had/had not worked previously.

When you're poaching the whole chicken, you should be able to skim the fat off the resultant broth once its cooked. If you reduce the broth down and then freeze it in cubes it will last longer and won't take up too much space in the freezer. (Thaw out cube and add some extra water to serve).:)
 
My OTJ kitty Wink gets 5.5 ounce each 24 hour period. He weighs 10.11 to 11.0 pounds per his twice weekly weighin's. He has managed to gain 6-8 ounces on this 5.5 ounce daily food intake over the last year or so.

You kind of have to experiment and see what works best for your cat. ECID. The weekly weight checks are very helpful. Same time of day, pre-meal is when I do the weight checks.
 
@Deb & Wink Thanks for the information. It's good to know a range of what everyone is feeding their cat so as I start to keep going lower and lower I can reassure myself that I'm not actually starving her like she wants me to believe. If it were up to her, she would eat 24/7 from a smorgasbord. I'm going to get the scales like everyone has suggested and start decreasing her food intake over a period of time until I see a gradual weight loss taking place.
 
I believe that portion size is a very individualized status. Depending on age, activity level. and metabolism...you will need to find out what best works for your precious baby. This is done primarily through trial and error. I feed my cat 5 times a day over a 15 hour period. She has been eating about 5.5 ounces daily. With her recent wellness exam I saw that she had lost around 6oz of weight. All her lab levels were perfect; but, I chose to increase her portion size a bit. Good luck from jane and stewey
 
Wink went from eating 11-13 ounces when he was still getting insulin down to his current 5.5 ounces of food once he was regulated and then off insulin. ECID.

Yes, I know the feeling of having a kitty smorgabord out. I was doing that, offering 2-3 different flavors per meal, when trying to get Wink switched from dry to wet food.

Sometimes, decreasing the food by only a half or whole teaspoon or so a day can make a difference.

Wink gets fed 4 times a day and he knows when that should be! You should hear him every evening at second supper time, meowing and begging for food and telling me it's time to stop reading my book and feed him NOW!!!!!! He'll rustle a plastic bag or knock the dvd's out of their storage box to get my attention. ;)
 
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