Phat Phil’s Road to Slim:

A CAT’S DIET DIARY

My cat Jean-Philippe is not what you might charitably describe as “big- boned”. In fact, his head and his tail are on the petite side. But then there’s his giant, jiggly belly. A year ago, he weighed in at just under 11 kilograms. Now he’s a svelte 9.5 kilos, although our journey is far from over.

Depending on your age and cultural tastes, you might describe him as the feline Orson Welles, or maybe the kitty John Belushi, or perhaps the tabby Notorious B.I.G. I usually call him Phat Phil. I love him, but he is basically a meat loaf with fur. That makes him adorable and lovable, but not all that healthy. To make sure that Phil sticks around for as long as possible,

I knew I needed to make some changes to his diet – whether or not he was fully on board with them.

Phil’s feral past

Not to make excuses for him, but let me tell you a little about his back story. I adopted him when he was about six months old. Before he came to my house, he had been feral, found with a couple of other kittens hiding in a sewer grate. The rescue group that captured him told me he had been kept alive by hunting lizards and from the generosity of a man who worked in a local bakery who gave him handouts. From reptile burgers and bread carbs, there was nowhere to go but up.

Like many former feral animals, Phil always tended to act as if he were starving to death. He wolfed down his cat food and whined for more. But as an indoor-outdoor cat, he was at least getting plenty of exercise. Outdoor life is hazardous for cats – they can be hit by cars, felled by diseases, and set upon by predators – but waistline expansion is not a major risk. All of that changed when I moved Phil and his (non-feral, non-fat) adopted sister, Tufa, across the countr y to a fourth-floor apartment. He became a full-time foodie. Eleven porkishly plump kilograms of feline f labulosity. In hindsight, maybe creating a pet paradise in my backyard would have been a good idea to ensure he got a little more exercise.

Since I am the Opener of the Cans, I can only blame myself. I’m admittedly a pushover. I felt sorry for him, deprived of his lizard kingdom. I also made the same mistake I’ve made

SINCE I AM THE OPENER OF THE CANS,

I CAN ONLY BLAME MYSELF

when I’ve tried to shed a few human kilos. Oh, how much could it hurt? I was clearly in denial. I finally realised things were getting out of hand – OK, out of paw – when he outgrew his cat carrier and the new one that was the right size for him was marketed to medium-sized dogs.

A dawning of a diet

His vet emphatically suggested a diet. Cats are vulnerable to many of the same health problems that obese humans are – and in fact, X-rays show that Phil already has some arthritis in his front paws. In his case, the stakes are even higher; he had a tumour removed from one of his back legs, and if it ever comes back, the veterinary recommendation is amputation. The vets say that tripod cats usually do quite well under those circumstances, but not if they’re dragging around the equivalent of a whole other cat.

Although Phat Phil needed to become Sylph-Like Phil, or at least

Somewhat-Less-of-a- Chunky Phil, it’s dangerous for cats to lose weight too quickly. Crash diets can cause a potentially fatal condition called hepatic lipidodis. Rather than slash Phil’s weight by half or more, the vet decided to aim for a more modest goal of eight kilograms – still 25 per cent of his body weight, or the equivalent of a 91-kilogram human whittling down to 68 kilos. She sent me to a website that calculates how many kilojoules a day a cat needs in order to slim at a healthy pace. We were on our way.

You apparently need advanced algebra to count cat-food kilojoules.

Phil eats a combination of raw, freeze-dried, and canned food, and he began his diet at 1133 kilojoules a day. Have you ever tried to figure out the kilojoules in your cat’s favourite brands? Some don’t say at all. Others tell you in teeny-tiny print. Or they publish it in terms that require you to revise on high school algebra and

figure out, say, that if 450 grams of freeze-dried chicken nuggets contain 523 kilojoules, with a kitchen cup weighing about 700 grams, and 50 nuggets fit in a cup, each nugget has... wait, carry the 3.... In general, this is the very best diet for cats, according to vets.

Not surprisingly, a small food scale and a calculator are now fixtures in my cat-food cupboard. I also realised that there’s a huge disparity in how fattening different foods are. A small pouch of one of Phil’s favourite brands can range from under 200 kilojoules to more than 400. So, one of the first things I had to do was to find a happy medium of flavours that he liked, that would satisfactorily fill him up, and that would stay within his kilojoule count.

And hooray! After more than a year, he’s down to nine kilos and change – on a good day – and his dai ly ki lojoule count has been reduced to 1050. But it’s an ongoing struggle. He’s a hardened, cagey, sneaky food thief. I feed his sister on a high benchtop that he can’t reach, but he regards the dining-room table as fair game. Just this morning, I got distracted for a moment and realised he (who had already chowed down breakfast) had sprinted off with a piece of my smoked salmon.

IT’S AN ONGOING STRUGGLE.

HE’S A HARDENED, SNEAKY FOOD THIEF

And the battle continues

He wheedles. And nags. He starts lobbying for dinner at about 1pm, sometimes rising up on his hind legs and tapping me on the shoulder with his front paw as I sit at my computer. If he had a watch, he’d be pointing at it. Resisting his pleas takes as much self-control on my part that I can muster. But I persevere.

And any month now, my boy is going to slim down that dog-sized body and become the size of a very large cat.