how to calorie count? - am I overfeeding my cat?

I was wondering if I could get some help calorie counting for my cat.  My cat came to me as a stray last summer and has been constantly hungry ever since.  He’s a big enough cat at just over 6kg (~13lbs) – he carries the weight well enough and when last at the vet he said that he has a bit of meat on him but is at a weight that he’s happy with.  I think, however, that he’s a bit on the pudgy side and am worried that if I continue to feed him as I am he’ll tip over to being on the overweight side.

I was just feeding him dry food but since joining this site I’ve realised that that isn’t the best for him and have tried to change that.  I’ve had an awful time trying to find a wet food that he likes but it seems he puts up with is two flavours from the same brand of the dry food I give him.  (This brand is grain free – although I do realise the dry food has potato as a filler.)

Generally what I feed him is:

1x 200g (~7oz) can of the wet food below in the morning

30g (approx.) of the dry food (~1oz) below made up of maybe two 15g servings in the late afternoon/evening

Wet food:

• REAL NATURE WILDERNESS DARK FJORD ADULT Wild Boar with Duck & Reindeer

​Composition

32% wild boar (comprising hearts, lungs, liver, meat), 32% duck (comprising hearts, liver), 28.8% duck broth, 4% reindeer, 2% cranberries, 1% minerals, 0.1% catnip, 0.1% linseed oil

OR

• REAL NATURE WILDERNESS BLACK EARTH ADULT Beef & Buffalo

​Composition

34% beef (comprising hearts, meat, lungs, liver), 34% buffalo (comprising lungs, hearts, liver), 28.8% beef broth, 2% currants, 1% minerals, 0.1% spirulina, 0.1% salmon oil

Dry food:

REAL NATURE WILDERNESS WIDE SAVANNAH ADULT Poultry with Lamb

Metabolisable energy

kcal/100g                                                            375,399 (I’m not too sure why there are two numbers? – this is from their website and I can’t find a figure on the package)

kJ/100g                                                              1.570,67

Composition

Chicken meat meal (22%), wild boar (18%), potatoes (dried, 14%), potato meal (11%), chicken fat (10%), turkey meal (5%), duck meal (4%), lamb meal (4%), protein (hydrolysed, 4%), apples (dried, 4%), fresh chicken liver (3%), spinach (0.5%), mannan-oligosaccharides (0.012%), fructo-oligosaccharides (0.012%), blackcurrants (0.01%), blueberries (0.01%), yucca schidigera (dried, 0.007525%), cranberries (dried, 0.005%), rosemary (dried, 0.0034%), catnip (dried, 0.00204%), parsley (dried, 0.00136%), psyllium seed (dried, 0.00102%), stinging nettle (dried, 0.00085%), chamomile (dried, 0.00085%), algae (ascophyllum nodosum, dried, 0.00051%)
I give him the wet food maybe three/four times a week as another problem I’m finding is that he gets a pretty stinky bottom from it but that’s probably for another thread and I am trying to read up on it.  When I just feed him dry food I give him approx. 60g/day split into two servings.

If he's a bit on the podgy side, reduce his food intake by a tiny bit, say 5g.  Then wait and see how he looks.  You should be able to feel ribs but only just, not feeling any ribs at all equals too fat, feeling ribs too easily equals underweight.


Where do you live that you can buy food made from wild boar, reindeer, and buffalo? 

Brilliant @Brian007 - thanks so much for the advice - really helpful!

I think my Scraggles is around the number 4 there on that chart - but he has a coat that's around 2 inches long so it's a bit hard to tell sometimes - I think it makes it look bigger than he is - it's when I lift him up that I feel the belly - and I am struggling a bit to feel the ribs...

I don't live anywhere near as exotic as my food - little old Ireland! - Real Nature is I think a German own brand of one of the bigger pet shops here - Maxi Zoo - it has quite a few interesting flavours - most of which Scraggles turns his nose up at :/

Thanks again!

A general rule of thumb is 20 calories per pound for an indoor/low activity cat all the way up to 35 calories per pound for an outdoor only active cat who is running up trees, getting in fights and generally being highly active. Most indoor only cats fall in the low 20 range. I took a look at your post with photos of him and he doesn't look overly pudgy to me. But a change in diet and quality of food does merit an evaluation of how much is being fed. 

I like Brian's chart better but this chart has a description of how the ribs should feel at different weights which I think is helpful with the fluff cats. Probably click to enlarge and read the little blurb below the graphics. 


Cat I just say that I am super jealous of not only the meat content but also that they give you a percentage breakdown of each ingredient. Just wow. 

Great @Kieka, thanks so much! – yeah – I think he’s a pudgy 4 – I find it hard enough to judge this as he was so incredibly scrawny when he first arrived it means I don’t know what he looks like “healthy” and also what he should look like with winter coat if that makes sense.   I’ve uploaded two more photos though – they aren’t a great quality but they show his hind quarters slightly better I think – but again, with his poofy hair it’s difficult to judge.   I’ll try get one that shows his droopy belly a bit.  Also I think he's very slowly but surely gaining weight rather than just maintaining it.

With the food by the way, in general, here in Europe, German brands have a really good reputation – even “budget” products tend to be of a high standard and it’s nice to see that this is reflected in their cat food also



​this compared to not too long after arriving...

He looks fine to me, lovely healthy looking coat.  Dudley is also very "poofy" and I find it incredibly difficult to judge his fatness.  He's a ragdoll so is naturally big, solid, and sturdy, and his tummy pouch is more pouchy than usual.   All neutered cats have a slight tummy pouch, apparently ragdolls are even pouchier.  Your cat certainly doesn't look grossly overweight though.  So just reduce his food by a little bit for, say, two weeks, and then reassess his size and weight.  You don't want to diet him too drastically all in one go.  By the time he's gotten used to the reduction, he'll be more amenable to a further reduction, if necessary.  But I expect just -5g a day would do the trick.

Brian007 said:

He looks fine to me, lovely healthy looking coat.  Dudley is also very "poofy" and I find it incredibly difficult to judge his fatness.  He's a ragdoll so is naturally big, solid, and sturdy, and his tummy pouch is more pouchy than usual.   All neutered cats have a slight tummy pouch, apparently ragdolls are even pouchier.  Your cat certainly doesn't look grossly overweight though.  So just reduce his food by a little bit for, say, two weeks, and then reassess his size and weight.  You don't want to diet him too drastically all in one go.  By the time he's gotten used to the reduction, he'll be more amenable to a further reduction, if necessary.  But I expect just -5g a day would do the trick.

Click to expand...

A cat's tummy pouch is called a "primordial pouch". It's just loose skin so if you feel it it should feel like a deflated balloon. This goes back to cats days in the wild so that they would have flexibility in the stomach after a large kill. All cats have one (at least a little bit, under their rib cage, except sometimes it's not visible because it doesn't sag below the waist line). Because of hormone changes in fixed cats, the size of the primodial pouch increases, which is why it begins to visibly sag below the waist). Primordial pouch size will also increase in overweight cats who have lost weight (all that extra skin has to go somewhere) and in older cats, who will also inevitably lose weight due to decreased muscle tone and bone density. So, basically, that belly pouch is unavoidable and nothing to worry about.

I found rather difficult to judge whether my cat has the "right" weight.  Images on the net to check weight looks like of an Ideal Cat who has no fur and being a sort of 90-60-90 in the cat's world  Well, except the case of a really obese cat or a really underfeed one. So, in my humble view, the images have a guidance role, they are not set in stone.

 An 0.000.something%  catnip can not have any significant impact on the metabolism, as it is far to little. Could however be some impact, if synergy is considered, but personally I have no information about synergic impact of the components of diet (I suspect it very difficult to estimate such a synergy)..

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On the number of calories: calories are just a rough guidance, as they are physics-related and not biology-related.  The individual variability is very high.

We humans cannot  control our weight, one reason being diet components that are more concentrated that the natural ones (or of a tricky chemical structure) and therefore cheat the regulatory metabolic machinery,

It is not just about calories alone, it is also a matter of the ratio calories / physical activity - difficult to control (at least because we cannot really measure physical activity of a particular cat). We assume some energy consumption by rules like indoor vs. outdoor cats, but if an outdoor cat is a dreaming animal while an indoor cat is a football player, then the rule is broken and we are sent to the fuzzy land of combined assumptions

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What I do is to make sure I feed my cat as little as possible non-meat components.

I have never seen an obese tiger.   

@Solomonar   Well, you've seen a fat tiger now!  

Poor thing  

@ Brian

Thank you for your answer.  Indeed, this is what happens if we try to replace Nature without knowing to much: just feeding the animal is not sufficient to keep him in good shape and health.

===

As a parenthesis: Tigers and Cats are not quite close relatives, despite their close appearance:  Tigers belong to sub-family Pantherinae while Cats belong to sub-family Felinae.

Out of Felinae, leopard is quite commonly kept in Zoos, and we may draw some conclusion about the overall sub-family metabolism. If somebody would bother to study them in this respect.

Another very interesting animal we can refer to gain some info about Felis catus is the caracal, from the same sub-family as Felis catus  (at least the caracal is bigger than the cat, making study more accessible). One can not refrain to love caracals (biiiig purring cats, lovely ears). Still very elusive nocturnal animals but relatively easy to keep in captivity.

https://bigcatrescue.org/caracal-facts/

End of parenthesis (although I am not so sure is a real parenthesis).

Thanks so much all for all the advice - really interesting re the little pouch belly - I think it did appear not long after I got him neutered - that's really when he started putting on a bit more weight - but it's also when he started growing his winter coat a bit more also - once I go through a year with him I'll hopefully have a better idea of how he looks during different seasons - but comforting to know he looks O.K. from the photos!

I'm going to reduce his food by the 5g and I've also been thinking for a while of introducing more actual meat in general (I'm a vegetarian myself and haven't cooked meat in years  - but if it's healthier for Scraggies I might have to change that...) - and thank-you Solomonar/Brian007 for the valid obese tiger mention - I do exercise/play with Scraggles but he gets very over stimulated after not very long (he was weirdly afraid of toys when he first arrived) - but we're working on it

@scraggles  I'm a life-long vegetarian myself, and I think @Solomonar  is also.  I can't get my head around raw, bloody meat, or the idea of the cooking smell, as my whole family are vegetarians and the concept of meat is kinda alien to me.  But, I'm trying to find my cat some very high % meat content dry food, and also some wet food that he'll actually eat (he's a fusspot).  It's not easy being green   (as a well known frog would say).

The same with me. My cat is obligate carnivore. Myself I am vegetarian.

A Bird can love a Fish, but where they will go to shul?

Think

How funny to have that in common!!    I wonder, when being vegetarian, you're sometimes forced to think a bit more about your own nutrition - does that trickle down into how we think about our cats'?!  

Honestly, I think more about my (lack of) physical activity than to what I eat. And I very rapidly found out that we do not know to much about cat metabolism, so I went mix diet (dry + wet + raw) to make sure I minimize the risks. You know - like diversifying the personal investment portfolio.  :-) 

don't talk to me about lack of physical activity - one of the reasons I try to "eyeball" Scraggles' weight as much as possible rather than actually weigh him is that to weigh him I also have to weigh myself

I like your dry + wet + raw​ - I think that might be the way to go with Scraggles also