Hannah and Phoebe
Member
Hello! My Phoebe has been diabetic since 2020, but I have just now found this forum and begun implementing some long over-due changes to improve her health with the help of the excellent folks on this message board. Phoebe has IBD and we are currently transitioning her to wet food, as well as incorporating some supplements into her diet. Here are some questions I've had over the last couple weeks:
- As a new-ish wet food user, I just wanted a sanity check on the amount of food we are giving. I know that wet food is less calorie-dense, but it seems like A Lot! I used the cats.com calorie calculator, with Phoebe being 12yo, spayed, and normal weight at 9.4lbs. That gave me a daily calorie requirement of 250 (does this sound reasonable in your experience?). The food we have settled on for now is Instinct Rabbit, with 83cal for 1 small (3oz) can, meaning she would get 3 small (3oz) cans per day = 9oz wet food per day. Does my math all check out there? When I look at the food in her dish, 4.5oz just looks like a lot for her to eat in one sitting. I am guessing that many people would split that into 3 meals per day. But that kind of leads me to my next question:
- Historically, at least since Phoebe's diagnosis, we have been a 2-cat-meal per day household. This is due to us having two other kitties (civvies) and wanting to ensure that each cat gets the amount and type of food they need, and my partner and I both working full time, sometimes from home, but often not (and it's not super predictable). I think what we need is a product that does not yet exist as far as my research has found, which is an automatic feeder that is also keyed to each cat's microchip. Auto-feeders exist, and microchip feeders exist, but they have yet to create a product that combines the two (my partner is an electrical engineer and believes she could jerry-rig something, but I'm admittedly a bit skeptical). Has anyone with multiple cats who works out of the house found a good solution to this? Or perhaps I'm overthinking this and we should just give small meals/snacks on the days we're home, which leads me to my 3rd question:
- With diabetes, my impression has been that it is quite important to be consistent in your food and insulin routines. Meaning giving the same amount(s) of food and insulin at the same times of day (unless of course you are reducing or increasing the dosage in a systematic way). My assumption is that this also probably applies to snacks or feeding 2 vs. 3 meals per day. I.e. I know there will be multiple days during the week when we will not be home to give snacks/smaller more frequent meals, so I've refrained from ever doing it, even on the days we are working from home, for the sake of consistency. Is this the right thing to do? Should we still be "feeding the curve" when we can? Or is it more important to be consistent from day to day?
Rabbit and other novel proteins are all he can eat.
