Are you worried your cat is losing weight?

Concerned about your cat’s health and well-being? Think some cat weight loss might be in order? If you think that’s the case, you’re probably right. Your cat, and the other members of your human family, may not agree, however. While you may not be able to have an open and candid conversation with your cat-at least not a two way conversation-you can certainly have that conversation with the rest of your household. The whole family will have to be on board if you are to have any impact at all on cat weight loss.

Am I an expert on cat weight loss? No. I’m not an expert on much, when it comes to pets, except from the standpoint of paying for the pet food. I do have some anecdotal experience with discovering, then responding to, the need for our family cat, Roary, to participate in a healthier lifestyle.

Here’s the background. We have two young children, five and eight years old. We have a fairly young cat, the aforementioned Roary. Roary is an indoor cat. His major source of exercise is playing with the kids (We have squirrels in our yard that I think outweigh him). Roary and the kids have great fun together, usually. The fun slowed down a bit last year, and that’s when we figured out that Roary was a great candidate for cat weight loss.

Last year, we noticed that Roary seemed a bit less playful than before. Our son, the eight year old, likes to play a bit more aggressively than our daughter, age five. He never tried to use Roary as a football, but he’s a boy. He’s more active with Roary than simply holding the cat in his lap. Normally, Roary is a willing participant in our son’s games.

Roary would still play, but after a short period of time Roary would run and hide. To our son, the game was not over. To Roary, it was nap time. We were sure that this was not normal behavior for a young cat. We didn’t immediately suspect the need for cat weight loss-at least not at first. Roary didn’t look pregnant.

We have a friend that works at a local animal shelter. She is remarkably tolerant of our less than knowledgeable questions. Plus, she works really cheap. Her advice was to check the litter box. What was Roary doing there? And, check the food that he’s eating. What was he doing there? If there’s an increase at both ends, then cat weight loss may be just what the vet ordered. Was Roary processing more on both the input and output?

We didn’t really have a great benchmark of output, but intake was down, for sure. This seemed counter-intuitive as a symptom of cat weight loss. Our dear Roary was eating less, and seemed to be going through cat litter maybe just a little faster than before. What was going on?