I wanna try an experiment but I’d also like others experience here.
I’ve noticed certain cats eat tok fast and also go back to extra food. I feel like if the overeaters/gulpers were let to eat last and then all food leftovers were removed afterwards we might have less instances of vomiting afterwards.
What say you, cat-owning Lemmings?
Take away the cats and get a dog
My vet recommended feeding my cats once a day when they turned 1yo. It was a very noisy transition from being free fed as kittens to only eating once a day.
We all found our happy place by feeding them dry food in the mornings and pudding treats in the evening (its mostly water! < is what I tell to my vet). My vet is happy that my cats are at a healthy weight, my family is happy that we no longer hear the song of our cats’ people at 3am, my cats are happy that they get to eat treats.
Also they don’t vomit anymore and don’t leave any leftovers since they know that it’s the next day before they can eat big again. We were able to maintain their weight at 3.8kg for 6mos now since we started this diet.
I’ve always just left bowls of food out for my animals. Gets topped up every 4ish days. Fresh water every morning though.
Everyone’s mileage will vary though, some dogs and cats just can’t be left with food. They’ll eat till the vomit. I don’t think there’s any way to fix it, just roll with it.
That sounds overindulgent to the point its literally the opposite of my problem. I feel the one cat is eating too much + too fast to the extent its causing them to vomit it up making it all fruitless anyway
Uuhh, I do the same as Schmidt and leave the food out. It works fine NOW, but let me tell you about when it failed. I’ve had different cats for decades and never had a problem until my current cat, who was listed at the shelter as ‘shy’. They told me she’d escaped people multiple times and they’d only managed to get her out of the walls the previous day (after she’d been hiding in them for over a week). She was adult, but small and thin and harboring a deep hatred for being confined (she isn’t ‘shy’, she’s extremely willful). We brought her home and she immediately found a hiding spot behind the oven, near the food and water that was out for the finicky older cat. For the first week, the only way we knew the new cat was still in the house was because we’d wake up, find the cat bowl empty and a big pile of cat vomit on the floor. We’d clean up the vomit, fill the bowl, and generally leave the kitchen alone as much as possible. After that initial week, the cat figured out that there would always be food. She would not starve. She did not need to gorge, and gorging was not comfy. Eventually she came out and accepted her new ‘family’. She continued to over-eat a bit too much for several months, but she settled on a chunky weight and has stayed at it for several years now.
Now I have a theory: I suspect that cats who experience food insecurity are far more likely to gorge themselves, and may never stop as long as they suspect their food supply is limited. If you want to test that theory with your own cats, I would be interested in hearing the results.
Get an automatic feeder.
We have an overeater, and a self-limiter. When the overeater developed markers of being pre-diabetic, we finally hardened our hearts and put him on a strict diet. For us, this was extremely hard, as he begged 24/7. He would yowl at all hours of the day, and it woke us up at night. After a month of this with no sign of him changing his behavior, I bought an automatic feeder from Amazon for ~$30.
The main change was that our’s quickly stopped seeing us as the main source of food, and this eliminated most of - and all of - the nighttime begging. It took a week or so, but it was pretty fast.
Second, most have multiple feeding times. This helps in two ways: first, it allows more, smaller portions, which eliminates the binge/purge issue. Second, it allowed us to have feeding times throughout the night, which helped with stopping the nighttime begging.
Third, it’s really easy to calculate caloric input from just the information on the food bag; the portion sizes can be set in the feeder, and it’s an easy, reliable control.
As a minor benefit, it makes feeding easier.
This obviously only works if you feed kibble.
One issue we did have was that we initially gave the self-limiter free-choice kibble on the counter, and it was enough to keep him away from the feeder. This worked because our diet boy was too fat to jump up onto the counters. However, the feeder was so successful that one day he discovered that he had slimmed down enough to get onto the counter, and we had to change tactics. After much tribulation, we simply ended up getting a second auto-feeder and set them to the same schedule. It isn’t perfect, but the dieter is still slowly losing weight, and the self-limiter is maintaining, so it seems to be working for now.
I just give mine their food in batches. Usually a half cup in the morning and a half cup in the evenings (I have two cats).
If I leave out the same amount of food, such as if I’m leaving the house for a weekend trip, I will come back to hungry kitties.
