One quick note before we get to your questions from earlier. Thank you for revising the times in the AMPS cell. I believe you shot 2.5 hours late today which would be +14.5 but you show +15.5 on the SS.
I don't have a data point to reference for you on the SS other than 12/10, because we aren't often in the position of shooting that low, but I've never fed a +10, only preshot or +1 and +2. What I do know is that if she is falling, rather than rising at a preshot, it will continue and even if it's gradual, it's still going to be roughly a 20 point drop, big deal if preshot is 70, not as much if it's 80 or 90. I started feeding her gravy or honey with RadCat at drops I noticed early in the cycle sometime after 11/24. Here are the cycles that illustrate what I'm talking about, the first 2 on a decline with no food intervention (other than RadCat) the second 2 on a decline with honey and RadCat: 11/1 PM, 11/24 AM, 11/29 PM, 12/6 PM. with varying degrees of success, but the best marker for success, more than food intervention, was a (slightly higher) low preshot number. When she's going down, the food bump is negligible with honey and FF gravy (12% carb), 20 points at best, it seems. These also end on, what looks to me to be a double dip cycle.
Let’s look at those cycles ( and thank you for being specific....very helpful).
11/1 The a.m. cycle was a bounce clearing cycle and I would expect her to keep dropping after PMPS.
11/24: Not a bounce clearing cycle and it was a perfect, flat cycle.
11/29: lovely PM cycle after clearing the bounce in the morning. She was down at +1 but the rest of the cycle might have been affected by the honey (it brought her up so she onsets from a higher number) and then she bounced or lost duration (hard to tell without being able to see how fast she climbed that night).
12/6: She was clearing the bounce the day before. That morning just looks to me like normal waning of the previous PM shot by AMPS and then she onset. PMPS looks like second dip.
I didn’t count the times but it looks to me like she doesn’t get a food spike as much as she does. Not all cats get a +1 food spike (Gracie often did not) and that can make our work a little harder. What it looks like to me is she’s getting enough duration on some of these cycles that her second dip is around +1 and then she onsets and drops lower. Or, even more likely, she is a very early onset kitty. Take a look at Gabby’s SS (hyperlink is not working on my iPad right now so here's the link:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jBOu0s4cv1XI6_-whkECk_kQGVwhr6Fryw-bFt-SCuE/pub?hl=en&hl=en#. Look at her oldest SSs and you’ll see a very familiar pattern. This was before Sienne learned to control the drops. If you look at her newest SSs, Sienne figured it out and was a master at it. She couldn’t use HC food or gravy because Gabby was allergic so she used LC food and honey or karo....I don’t remember which. When the remarks state “HC”, it was honey or karo.
I struggle with having the higher carb food in the regular mix only because I have known this cat for a couple decades and like most, she's really picky and weird about food. My fear is that she will fixate on the 6-8% carb, if I find one she will eat, and then refuse the RadCat or visa versa. She's always been a one food kind of cat. I had to switch her from kibble to wet, cold turkey, no choice in the matter, because of teeth extractions. (I know they say cats without teeth can eat kibble, but I'm here to tell you, they can choke on it too). She lost some weight refusing to eat more than a bite or two in the beginning of that transition, depsite following all the rules of transitions and trying all kinds of foods, and I'm insanely lucky she didn't get fatty liver and die. Her diet has so much to do with her health and I researched and agonized over choosing it, so I have to dig my heels in a bit. I'm very open to modifying the radcat with higher carbs somehow or just feeding gravy, on its own, in addition when necessary. I found some mousse varieties of cat food? I heard they sell just cat gravy?
No it is not necessary to dig you’re heels in. I completely respect your knowledge of her and I understand why you wouldn’t want to tip the apple cart. So the best option is to work with what she will eat as you have been doing. I don’t know if they just sell gravy but that is an option. Oddly, honey really didn’t work for Gracie like karo did. I wish it had because I felt it was more natural but it would not do much with low numbers for her. Again, ECID.
She does seem to need bigger guns for these isolated instances, which I'm guessing will become more frequent if she settles in to greens and I have lower preshot numbers consistently. That's my sticking point with having another food in the mix regularly. I think she treats the gravy like a treat and it probably doesn't fill her up like food, so that's why I say gravy, mousse, something more like that than a meaty cat food.
Thanks so much for your insight, I'm glad you've seen these tricks before so I don't have to reinvent the wheel. I think I just need to find a food modification that I can live with that will give the carbs needed to get her over the hump.
Actually, when they start to really churn out the green, they get really flat. Where they need bigger guns is when they are still bouncing and then clearing the bounces.
If you have a cycle where she’s dropping or has been in green, you might want to get in the h it of checking the +10. If she’s still dropping and is green or she’s in the 60s, you might want to try and see if she’ll eat a couple tsp of raw. What we want to try and do is clip the duration a bit on those cycles so you might get a bit higher PS, can shoot on time, and then feed raw with a little gravy, if need be, to see if you can slow down the +1 drop.
I don’t really know of any mousse foods.
To get back on schedule, I’d suggest shooting the same time in the morning as you did tonight and then 30 mins early tomorrow night. I always found it easier to shoot early 30 mins once a day than 15 mins twice.
It's a bookmark worthy for sure!