How much food does she need?

I'm learning, so please bear with me.


So far, we've learned that Kittica needs four meals a day to be content, or to at least let US live through the day. And, even moreso - night.

But how do I know how much we should feed her? She's a year old and weighs around 8 pounds 3 ounces. Maybe a bit more. Doesn't look overweight, but is addicted to food and would eat a couple whole cows if she could. At once and probably with seven loaves of bread. (Speaking of which, is there something about cats and bread? Because she is nuts about it. She'd sell her soul for just a small piece, which she'll steal whenever an opportunity arises.)

Anyway.

We feed her Wellness canned food, or Wellness pouches, and only sometimes alternate with Merrick, or whatever those Grandma's pie and Thanksgiving Dinner foods are.

Then she also eats Wellness CORE for her dry meals.

Right now, she gets about 1/2 of dry food a day, as well as one 3 oz can. I split that into four meals:

- dry early in the morning
- some dry around my lunch time, always fed from Egg-Cersizer, which she loves
- 3 oz can early in the evening
- some dry before I go to bed, to keep us alive through the night

I wouldn't mind switching to more canned and less dry, but would love to keep this one mid-day meal as is because she really enjoys hunting down her egg and eating kibble from it.


So how much does a cat of her size and age need to eat a day? Especially if we switched to more canned and less dry.


(I hope I'm making sense here.)


Thanks everyone in advance!

But would she really need to drop a pound? This is the first time I've heard she could be overweight.

She's just a domestic shorthair and wherever I look, it actually says they should be anywhere between 8 and 12 pounds for females.

So far, even though they've been awesome and helpful when it came to a lot of things (all the issues one runs into with getting a stray...), they seem to not give out too much information on food that, in fact, makes sense.

I might not be weighing her correctly either, because right now my only option is to use my home scale, first without holding the cat, then with her and subtracting. So it can't be absolutely accurate.

She was 7 pounds 3 ounces (the vet weighed her) when we found her in November, when she was about 8 months old. I guess this information, sort of, makes me think it's not too bad to gain a pound or a bit more in four months. Even moreso because, when she was found, we were told she was a bit skinny and that we had to overfeed her for about a month. So we did give her more than what she's getting now, for sure.

But then again, I really am a brand new cat owner.

I actually keep surprising myself - I am, by no means, a cat person. Or, well, I thought I wouldn't ever become one. But ever since Kittica walked through that window... I guess things have been changing.