SullivansDad
Member Since 2020
Hi, I'm new here, so my apologies for the long backstory. I have a 15 year old male cat who was diagnosed with diabetes in late October 2019 after having a DKA event. He spent three days/nights at his old vet's office and was put on Vetsulin (2 units every 12 hours) and wet food (Friskies Pate. He had been a dry food grazer his whole life up to that point). His recovery was quick, and things were going great for about a month, then he slowly started eating less and less of his wet food until he got to the point where he was eating so little that we shouldn't have given him a shot (even the lowered dose of 1 unit) and he had a hypo event where we ended up having to take him to a 24 hour animal hospital for observation.
They had us stop his insulin for a week, put him on whatever diet we could get him to eat, and schedule a visit with his vet. We started feeding him Hill's m/d dry food (one quarter cup twice per day), he ate well, but without his insulin he started showing clinical signs again (gradually drinking and peeing more each day). His old vet's office said it would be about a month before they could see him again, so we switched vets and got him in to a new one immediately.
The new vet put him on Glargine (2.5 units every 12 hours) and a new feeding regime: twice a day, he gets fed a quarter cup of Hill's m/d dry food and gets 30 minutes to eat as much of that as he can, he gets his shot, and then we have to pick up his food. He did fantastic on this new regimen for a few weeks, eating about 90% of his meals on average, and showing great clinical signs (and acting more playful and energetic than he has in years!).
Now all of a sudden he is eating less and less at meal time and therefore not getting his full dosage of Glargine. We have even had to skip two doses entirely this week because he only ate about a third of his dinner those two nights. His clinical signs are still fantastic, and he seems happy and healthy, but we're worried he's going to backslide if he's not eating enough to cover his shots (and after experiencing a hypo event before, we are apt to err towards lower or even no doses when he doesn't eat well).
He seems plenty hungry and even looks around the kitchen as if he's looking for something else to eat, but he just walks up to his food and takes two bites and walks away (and after a while just walks up to it and turns up his nose and walks away, looking at us like he'd like something else to eat). He seems to be following the same pattern as he did when we had him on the wet food: gradually deciding to eat less and less of it as the weeks go by.
Has anyone else experienced this? If so, what was the cause/solution? We want to avoid trying to entice him to eat more by doing things like sprinkling a little cheese on his food or anything like that because we went that route with his wet food and it seemed to backfire (he'd lick off the cheese, not eat any more food, and beg us for more cheese). Thank you for reading, and thanks in advance for your help.
They had us stop his insulin for a week, put him on whatever diet we could get him to eat, and schedule a visit with his vet. We started feeding him Hill's m/d dry food (one quarter cup twice per day), he ate well, but without his insulin he started showing clinical signs again (gradually drinking and peeing more each day). His old vet's office said it would be about a month before they could see him again, so we switched vets and got him in to a new one immediately.
The new vet put him on Glargine (2.5 units every 12 hours) and a new feeding regime: twice a day, he gets fed a quarter cup of Hill's m/d dry food and gets 30 minutes to eat as much of that as he can, he gets his shot, and then we have to pick up his food. He did fantastic on this new regimen for a few weeks, eating about 90% of his meals on average, and showing great clinical signs (and acting more playful and energetic than he has in years!).
Now all of a sudden he is eating less and less at meal time and therefore not getting his full dosage of Glargine. We have even had to skip two doses entirely this week because he only ate about a third of his dinner those two nights. His clinical signs are still fantastic, and he seems happy and healthy, but we're worried he's going to backslide if he's not eating enough to cover his shots (and after experiencing a hypo event before, we are apt to err towards lower or even no doses when he doesn't eat well).
He seems plenty hungry and even looks around the kitchen as if he's looking for something else to eat, but he just walks up to his food and takes two bites and walks away (and after a while just walks up to it and turns up his nose and walks away, looking at us like he'd like something else to eat). He seems to be following the same pattern as he did when we had him on the wet food: gradually deciding to eat less and less of it as the weeks go by.
Has anyone else experienced this? If so, what was the cause/solution? We want to avoid trying to entice him to eat more by doing things like sprinkling a little cheese on his food or anything like that because we went that route with his wet food and it seemed to backfire (he'd lick off the cheese, not eat any more food, and beg us for more cheese). Thank you for reading, and thanks in advance for your help.
It’s definitely not low carb, but I don’t think it’s the worst dry food, maybe somewhere around 13% carbs. Young Again and Dr. Elseys are the only two dry foods that are truly low carb and okay for diabetics
