This is How Losing Weight Works for Your Cat Too

Tips and tricks for cat owners who want their cat to become slim and stay slim.

Congratulations! You have already taken two important steps on the way to diet success:

1. You have realized that your cat is overweight.
2. You’ve made a decision to do something about it.

So now it’s a matter of getting on with your cat’s diet and sticking with it. This is – we don’t want to kid you – a challenge for many cat owners. If you heed the following tips, however, you will make it a lot easier for you and your cat to achieve your goal.

Create Optimal Conditions

In order for your cat to successfully lose weight, we believe the following points are a must:

• Before starting the diet, take your cat to the vet for a health check. Only then can you rule out that there is a disease behind the weight problems or that secondary diseases have already arisen as a result of being overweight.
• Create a diet plan with realistic intermediate goals together with your veterinarian. Your vet can estimate how much and how quickly your cat should lose weight. The intermediate goals make it easier for you to persevere. And with a competent partner at your side, you can also overcome any setbacks more easily.
• Put your cat on a veterinary reduction diet. This means you can be sure that your cat will lose weight in a healthy way and will not suffer from any nutrient deficiencies despite being on a diet. You can find more information about the special features of veterinary weight loss diets in the article “Which cat food is best for my cat to lose weight?”.

Of course, cats whose owners have done it differently have also lost weight, but scientific research and practical experience have shown that the diet is most easily successful under these conditions and shows more lasting success (keyword yo-yo effect).

So if you’ve met these more technical requirements, you’re actually well on your way to becoming a lean cat. But the diet can still fail due to psychological factors that make you doubt the sense of the undertaking and weaken your will to persevere. After all, your cat won’t “see” why you’re suddenly changing your behavior when it comes to food and demanding the privileges you’re accustomed to.

So that you don’t get weak:

Invest Time in the Preparation Phase

If your cat is to lose weight, both you and your cat must discard habitual behaviors and replace them with new ones. This only works if you:

1. become aware of what has gone wrong so far,
2. take responsibility and
3. Approach the diet with a positive attitude.

How could it get so thick?

There are many reasons for obesity in cats and it is important that organic causes are ruled out by a veterinarian. If there is no underlying disease, however, it can be said that obesity is very often caused by misunderstandings in the human-cat relationship, because we cat owners try to strengthen the relationship with our cats through food. Although food for cats (unlike dogs) actually has no social meaning. However, we humans use treats, for example, as a token of love or to calm our guilty conscience and so many extra calories accumulate every day…

The Royal Canin snack table provides an overview of the calorie content of popular cat snacks.

This calorie table has one or the other aha effect ready: e.g. that two tablespoons of liquid cream (94 kcal) provide almost half of the daily energy requirement of a 4 kg cat.

In order not to fall further into these calorie traps, you should therefore familiarize yourself with the natural eating behavior of cats and observe yourself carefully when you are dealing with your cat. Then, step by step, you can replace the “unhealthy” behaviors with alternatives.

You can find more information about eating behavior in the article “The most common mistakes when feeding cats”.

A feeding diary in which you enter everything your cat gets in terms of food treats or leftovers for a few days is helpful for many at the beginning. Such records are also very valuable for your veterinarian.

What makes you persevere until you succeed?

Unfortunately, if you want your cat to lose weight in a healthy way, there is no shortcut that will lead to success overnight. As a noble donor of cat food, you have to find the motivation to push through the diet every day, no matter what.

You’re no different than an Olympic champion who spends years before his big moment of success practicing the same movements over and over again, even if he’s long since internalized them. You don’t win this competition with your weaker self with muscles, but with heart and will. Examples of powerful motivational aids include:

• To paint the goal in the most beautiful colors —— over and over again. For example, you can imagine how wonderfully your cat can jump and play again when it is rid of its excess weight. Hang a youthful picture of your velvet paw above the feeding bowl, showing her slim and fit while playing…
• To break down a big goal that seems far away into many small steps and to be happy about every small step forward. Make small improvements visible by periodically photographing your cat from above and noticing how it is gradually developing a waist again. This often motivates more than just logging the weight.
• Do everything to ensure that the word “diet” triggers only positive feelings in you. When they think of “diet”, most people immediately have negative images of hunger, sacrifice, and hardship in their heads. This automatically develops the fear of failure and a certain feeling of helplessness. Owners of overweight cats also often have to deal with feelings of guilt. However, the more you consciously think about the benefits of the diet for your cat and yourself, the less powerful these negative associations will be and the greater your chance of success.

See the diet as a gift to your cat and to yourself: you give yourself more time together and your cat better health. Your cat is lucky that you do this for her!

By the way: No Olympic champion is solely responsible for his success. A team of trainers, physiotherapists, and motivational speakers are always at his side and push him when he’s slacking off. If possible, find supporters for your cat’s diet as well! In addition to the family who pulls along, the team at your veterinary practice can motivate you by defining your goals, reviewing them, and supporting you like a coach when you have setbacks.