Home Testing/Wet Food - Cat is losing weight

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Katie Champion

Katie Champion

Member Since 2018
We recently started home testing our cat Cleveland. He's always been a big boy. Used to be 21 lbs. When he was diagnosed with feline diabetes, his weighed 12 lbs. The dry food and insulin the vet sent us home with was what we tried for the whole summer and into fall. For the past 3 weeks, we've been doing home testing and switched to wet food. "Friskies Pate". He gets 1 can in the morning and 1 at night as no one is home during the day to feed smaller meals throughout the day. He is currently on 1U of insulin and I hesitate to increase it as again, no one is home throughout the day to monitor him. With the wet food and 1U of insulin, he is still constantly in the 300-400's range. And - his weight is dropping drastically. I'm not sure if there's an underlying issue or an easy fix that we are missing. We are VERY inexperienced, uneducated, and new to this.

Any insight is helpful. Thank you!!
 
Prozinc. We are trying to get our vet to switch him to Lantus. So far, I haven’t received an answer from the vet though.
 
Katie Champion said:
Prozinc. We are trying to get our vet to switch him to Lantus. So far, I haven’t received an answer from the vet though.
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Ah, my kitty is on ProZinc - lots of good info on the PZ Forum. I'm still pretty new here, but I do know that it will help if you could specify Cleveland's age, weight etc. The best advice I received coming here was to add those type of details to my signature and to set up the BG tracking sheet. Have you posted on the "I'm New" forum yet? That was also a big help, the veterans came to my rescue. Good luck!
 
You may want to consider getting an autofeeder so he can have snacks while you're at work. They've helped a lot of kitties here. The PetSafe5 is a favorite around here.

Until he's better regulated, he'll need more food than "normal". A diabetic can't properly use the nutrients in the food they eat so they eat more than a non-diabetic would. Think of insulin like it's a key and on every cell in the body there's a lock. Without the correct number of keys, the glucose that the cells need to survive can't get into them!

Have you started home testing yet? That's the only way to really know how he's responding to the current dose of insulin. Tests done at the vet's office are pretty much useless due to the stress the cat is under. Just that stress can raise the blood glucose up to 200 points!

It will get better if the only problem is diabetes though...if you look at China's Profile (in my signature) you'll see how far back she came with the help of the wonderful people here on the board!
 
We are home testing, yes. His levels are consistently in the 3&400’s. Before and after insulin. Weekends are our only time to test throughout the day as we both work more than a half hour from home. Would you suggest possibly feeding him more at his 2 feeding times to get him more food?
 
Katie Champion said:
Would you suggest possibly feeding him more at his 2 feeding times to get him more food?
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Most of us here feed multiple meals because it's easier on the pancreas to deal with smaller, more frequent meals instead of 2 big ones.

A non-regulated diabetic can need to eat twice as much so if he's willing to eat more, I think you'd be OK to feed more as long as he's losing weight, but it's a good idea to weigh him once a week so when he starts to gain, you can start to regulate how much he gets so he doesn't end up going too far in the other direction

Getting and using our spreadsheet will help us to give you the best advice.
 
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