27Mar/113
My cat was just diagnosed as pre-diabetic. I don’t know how much wet and dry food to feed her daily.?
I bought her Purina one wet and dry food for weight management. The vet just said to feed her 3 times a day. The problem is, I don't know how much of the wet and dry food to give her a day. She needs to lose weight, so I can't follow the amount printed on the bag and cans.
March 27th, 2011 - 05:19
Please speak to your vet who are the best qualified people to actually answer your question.
March 27th, 2011 - 05:23
You pretty much need to transition her off the dry food entirely or switch it to a small amount of grain free dry. A cat’s natural diet would be about 3% of calories from carbohydrate. Most dry food is 20-50% or even higher.
With a cat who is pre-diabetic, you may be able to avoid her going all the way into diabetes and needing insulin shots if you seriously cut down the carbohydrate — that can make a huge difference. If she’s not having to cope with so much carbs/ sugar, her blood sugar may be able to be kept in a normal range and allow her pancreas to heal. Then she will need to stay on a low carb diet.
Losing weight will also help with the diabetes risk. But a cat should not lose weight too fast, it’s dangerous to her liver. she shouldn’t lose more than 1-2% of her body weight per week. It would be handy if you have a very accurate scale, like a baby scale or large postage scale.
I highly recommend Dr Lisa Pierson’s site She has one main article on feline nutrition, http://catinfo.org. and also has articles on feline obesity http://www.catinfo.org/?link=felineobesity and on diabetes. http://www.catinfo.org/?link=felinediabetes
In the main article and the obesity one she goes into some detail about helping cats lose weight, figuring out how much to feed them etc. I think that might be helpful to you.
Also here is a link to a site with some charts that give nutrient info for many different cat foods. It’s not all very up to date but it’s the best collection of data available.http://binkyspage.tripod.com/index.html (scroll down to where it says Diet Related Documents). You should keep the carbs under 10%. Even better if you can most of the time keep it under 7%…. but note that many low carb foods have fish, and you should avoid feeding fish all the time. (thats not related to diabetes, but there are other issues (like mercury, often high phosphorus, etc.)
March 27th, 2011 - 05:40
RETURN THE PURINA!
seriously, most of the cats that have diabetes do because of all the bad things in their food and because of wet food. read your purina… does it have corn? TRASH! does it have byproducts? TRASH! does it have meal? TRASH!
dry food is awful for cats… even the best dry foods aren’t great for cats who naturally get most of their water from their foods.
you’ll want to get a wet food that has absolutely NO MEAL, NO BYPRODUCTS and nothing like rice, corn, or wheat. these are useless for cats and only cause problems. they are cheap fillers.
read the ingredients, but some brands to look into are blue buffalo, wellness, halo, fussie cat, petite cuisine, nature’s variety, evo…
I’d suggest twice a day. depending on his size (what his IDEAL weight is) about half a normal sized can twice a day should be good.
please check out this site for more info:
http://www.catinfo.org/