Does your cat lie all day, only getting up to eat or go to the litter box? Chances are he is overweight. You may have switched to a different cat food or fed him less, but you may have noticed that losing that weight isn't easy. A new study from the University of Illinois explains what it takes for the cat to lose weight. The intention of this diet was a healthy weight loss:to remove fat while preserving lean body mass. The big question was how much does it cost cats to lose weight, especially lazy neutered males? It turns out that you have to keep reducing their food intake because they are not very active. And that takes a long time. The target was a loss of 1.5 percent body weight per week.
To achieve that 1.5 percent loss, the researchers had to reduce food intake by 20 percent compared to a maintenance diet. But that was only the first reduction. The researchers found that to continue losing weight, they had to reduce intake each week. The second thing that needs to be changed is the owner's behavior:getting them to reduce food intake to maintain a healthy body condition score.
The researchers also evaluated changes in the cats' fecal microbiota — or bacteria, fungi and viruses that inhabit the gut — during the 18-week study. As weight decreased, some bacterial groups became more abundant, while others showed the opposite pattern. The researchers think the shifts could lead to positive health effects for the cats, such as lower inflammation.
Believing that they would have a little more spice in their stride as they got leaner, the researchers also measured the cats' voluntary physical activity during the experiment. The eight cats in the den, all sterilized males, were housed together in a large room for 20 to 22 hours each day, but only returned to their individual cages to eat. Researchers attached activity monitors to cats' collars to see how often they ran, played with toys, or climbed the cat towers in the room.
"Their activity level didn't change much," the researcher said. “Towards the end they got a little more active, but not statistically.” Still, he recommends that owners encourage their cats to exercise as much as possible, by playing with them and moving food bowls further away from their favorite resting places.
