? Small meals - how small?

How much is a "small? meal"

My Jester was up to four cans of 5.5 ounce Friskies per day and was still losing weight - from about 11 pounds to just over 7 pounds - and he still wanted more food.

We went to a new vet who suggested less food would be better and that what might be happening is the equivalent of Jester being completely unregulated because of far too many calories.

So over the course of about ten days I dropped him down to about 3.5 cans - vet wants him on no more than 300 calories a day ultimately

And after that ten days he had actually put on almost a full pound so I slowly brought it down to 3.25 cans. No weight loss or gain over the next week, but even that's a victory. So now we're going down to 3 cans and I'm hoping it'll make a difference again.

But he's *always* hungry it seems. I work during the day so I can't give him small meals all day. I feed him about a can in the morning when I give him his insulin - he drives me completely up the wall because he just meows over and over and over again while I try to get anything done - including just using the bathroom.

(I'm absolutely not a morning person and there are times I find myself yelling at him to shut up because I literally can't take ten minutes or more of constant unrelenting meowing. Then I feel guilty for yelling at him because he's just expressing himself the only way he can.)

And he always seems to want/need more to eat about an hour after his dosage, so I give him about a half a can more to tide him over till I get home.

When I walk in the door after work, it's the same thing as the morning. (I can handle it better because I'm not bleary from just waking up.)

I try to limit how much he gets with each feeding through the evening and night, but he always seems to want more. He'll cry and cry for me to keep feeding him.

I know it's hard to reduce a cat's food intake. I've never had to do anything like this before.

The vet prefers me to feed him just twice a day but I know many here do the "small meals" thing instead. And truthfully, there's no way I could get Jester to eat just two meals all in one go even if I wanted to.

FYI - Because I have three cats and one who is *very* aggressive about eating the other cats' food, I can't do one of those timed feeders.

So what is a small meal? And how do I get Jester used to them now?

btw, the target goal of 300 calories would be approximately 2.5 cans of the kind of Friskies he likes. (Truthfully, I'd like to try to get him on a lower carb food, but the vet recommended until Jester gains some weight not to experiment with other less reliable flavors that might put him off and on that I wholeheartedly agree. For the time being she recommended I settle on two or three flavors that he'll eat regularly and to give him those three in the same amounts every day.)

 

Bumping because I really need an answer to this and haven't gotten one yet.

 

My vet gave similar advice. She wanted me to start with 4.5 oz of wet food plus 1/8 cup of dry twice a day with his insulin. She wanted me to work on cutting that back to two 3 oz cans a day. I tried it for awhile, but Grandpa was howling with hunger starting at 5 am.

Then he started vomiting at +6 every day. The folks here told me to feed more often. That stopped the vomiting, but I was giving him up to four 5.5 oz cans like you. His numbers were all over the place.

Now I've cut out all dry food. I'm aiming for approx 3 to 4 oz of can food for the shot times and maybe half of that for snacks every four hours with the last around +4 after his evening shot. Between this new feeding schedule and the increase in his insulin dose, we are finally seeing yellows, which is big for him.

Good luck with finding something that works.

 

Still hoping for some advice on this.

 

I think what a small meal is will vary with the cat - ie., what the normal size meal is. If normal is half a 5.5 oz can, say, then a small meal might be a quarter can or less. The Friskies 5.5 oz cans vary in calories from a low of 128 to a high of 189 on Dr. Pierson's food chart. The higher calorie one is a low carb pate so I assume that's not going to pass muster with Jester. You'd need just under 2.5 cans a day of the lower calorie higher carb food to get 300 calories into him per day. That 10 quarter cans if we assume that a small meal is that size. Try to figure out a schedule whereby you can give those 10 quarter cans over your workday - maybe a half can or 3/4 can as breakfast, another half or 3/4 when you get home from work and the rest in the evening up until bedtime. I'm sure you can work out something that suits your schedule.

 

The flavors Jester is currently eating are Turkey filets, chicken filets, and Tasty Treasures turkey with bacon.
The first two are about 130 calories apiece, the last is about 150 calories.
The full cans I give him are always the lower calorie filets and I add water to try to fill him up a little more.
Half and quarter cans are the turkey with bacon because they're higher calorie, but he really loves them.

This makes so much sense to me. I can even give him 3/4 for breakfast, then 1/4 before leaving for work - that's close to what I'm doing now.

Thank you so much.
Even the vet that we've been going to for about a year agreed that Jester needs multiple smaller meals. He just never gave me an idea of how to do that. I was assuming that I should be feeding him *more* food, not breaking it all up over the day. Then I saw some folks here referring to small meals.

(Of course, this practice will likely be rough on Jester when I have to go away for a few days since the cat sitters can't maintain that same sort of schedule, but I can work things out with them since I now have two.)