How's that for a tongue twister?
We have a very fat middle-aged cat. When we brought her home from the Humane Society, about a year and a half ago she weighed 18 lbs. She is a big cat, not just a fat cat, so her health weight could be 12 lbs or more. She currently weighs about 16 lbs.
As much as I knew about human dieting, I thought putting a cat on a diet would be a breeze -after all, a cat can't raid the fridge.
One of the first things we did was get her a lower calorie "senior formula" cat food. She didn't like it, but being the only option, she did eventually get used to it.
However, we also discovered that the fewer calories you feed this cat, the less she moves.
Instead of free-feeding here, or feeding her twice a day, we started giving her frequent, but very tiny meals throughout the day. This backfired, as she began begging constantly.
We tried returning her to two larger meals, but when she has more than a smidge of food in her bowl, she'll scarf it so fast she throws up.
We've got her down to 3 or 4 meals, but the begging is horrible. She's got a lot of tricks to get extra food. She'll try to fool us into thinking the other hasn't fed her (so we're always yelling across the apartment whether she's been fed yet or not, because she puts on quite an impressive performance).
We've got our routine down fairly well, but in the past month we've been preparing for a move, packing and cleaning (Move day is Thursday), and our cat, like many, HATES change. She's been extremely annoyed, agitated, and disturbed by all of the changes in the house, and her food begging has become relentless and completely maddening.
She's always begging, and even though we give her her same sized meals at about the same time every day, since we've started the move process, she's constantly crying at her food bowl (and chewing on the cardboard packing boxes in frustration). Every morning, she seems to be waking me earlier and earlier for breakfast.
Today it was 5:00 am (or earlier, as I got the sense that she'd been trying to wake me for a while, before I noticed). Breakfast isn't until 8:30, so she usually doesn't start trying to wake me up until about 8:00. She has learned that "crabby, demanding kitty," earns her a time out in the bathroom, so she usually starts out being all lovey, hoping we'll get the hint and give her breakfast. Then, when she gets desperate she starts being a nuissance (then she'll get a time out in the bathroom, but when she comes out breakfast is usually ready).
It's so much like human dieting, that I can't help but sympathize. With all of the changes in the house, kitty is responding to the stress by begging for more food. It just hit home to me how stress-eating isn't always a reflection of deep-rooted emotional trauma. It's completely natural for a food-restricted creature to seek out food in stressful situations (I recently read that rat and primate studies have concluded the same thing).
I can't wait until we've moved and settled in, because it's hard enough to control my own food issues, without having to deal with the cat's.