When I saw this article yesterday, I tried to sit down and write something about it. But I just couldn’t be coherent – I kept making COME ON PEOPLE gestures and those don’t translate well in text. *grin* This expresses that flailing much more eloquently. – Marianne
My cat Ophelia is dying of cancer.
She has been dying of cancer for some time now. “Anywhere from a month to a year at the outside,” I was told by the vet when we got the diagnosis – presumptive intestinal lymphoma, which we could confirm via biopsy if we wanted but the shadows on the ultrasound were reasonably definitive.
That was October of 2007. It is 19 months later, and each day I get up and wonder “will this be the morning when I find her body?” but she keeps on keeping on, enjoying her gooshy food and chin skritches and late-night bouts of sitting on my head, poking my sleeping face so I’ll turn my head and snorgle her tummy. Her energy levels wax and wane, and she will no longer use a covered litter box (but that could just be her arthritis). She will now push my hand toward her lower belly when i try to scratch her chest, which could be an indication that she has pain down there and rubbing helps. But mostly she’s keeping on keeping on.
Ophelia was spayed when she was little, and she was one of those cats whose abdominal muscles never really knit, so she always had a big, droopy, swingy tummy. She was a “pleasingly plump” kitty for most of her life – she exceeded the recommendations in the vet’s office that suggested you should be able to palpate your pet’s ribs or your cat was obese. When she walked or ran, her tummy swung back and forth.
The experience of having a fat cat wasn’t all that different from being a fat person myself. People had opinions about Ophelia’s weight. “Wow, that cat doesn’t miss many meals!” the guy who came to fix our fridge remarked (I glared at him, and he was lucky I was too distracted by our fridge issues to go off on his unsolicited comment). My mom constantly asked me about Ophelia’s health, and gave me her opinions about the many diet foods I should try (because like the industry aimed at people, there is a whole industry around pet health that is filled with quacks pushing their products guaranteed to cure the “problem” of pet obesity). Vets said to me “well, you really should work on getting her weight down,” even when I pointed out that she ate less than half a cup of diet dry cat food a day, and got a tablespoon of wet food once a day (I imagine they assumed I was lying, just like fat people lie about what we eat). I occasionally pointed out that she ate the same food, in about the same quantities, as our Auxilliary Backup Cat Lenore who was always… wait for it… underweight, but to no avail. They never mentioned putting her on a kitty treadmill, so I was never sure what they wanted me to do other than restrict her food, but how that was meant to work with an underweight cat in the house was rather unclear.
The sad thing is that at her highest weight, Ophelia was about 13.5 pounds. That is a medium-largish cat, but not a massive cat. She was no Maine Coon with a body frame that naturally gravitated toward 20 pounds or more, but she was a medium-frame domestic cat who went outdoors in good weather but was mostly content with hanging out just chilling and looking over her domain rather than running, jumping, and climbing trees (no action transvestite, her!) She was not a cat that could barely get off the floor, or that fell asleep face down in her bowl. But people were FREAKED OUT about her weight. She was floppy in the tummy and curvy and a little soft, and it UPSET PEOPLE. (Wow, is that familiar…)
Now here’s the thing: She has a disease that is slowly destroying her ability to absorb nutrients because it’s taking over her intestinal tract. We are keeping it at bay with Prednisone, but we are on borrowed time at this point and have been for a long while. The last time I weighed her, she was a little over 9 pounds. Twice, she has dropped to just above 8 pounds, first when she had the pancreatitis that sent her to the vet where the cancer diagnosis emerged, and again about a year ago which led us to increase her medication dose. Both times she’s re-stabilized and picked up weight, but at this point she is THIN. She is a bony kitty across her back, her fur is dry and visibly sparse and never really grew back where she was shaved for the ultrasound.
And: If she had not had that reserve of weight, those precious five-plus pounds between her highest weight and her lowest, where would we be now? Those extra pounds insulated her, gave her a reserve to run on. Her tendency to conserve weight, a tendency that I believe is genetic given my subsequent experience with all our Auxilliary Backup Cats who have turned out in a rainbow of shapes and sizes and body types on exactly the same diet, has SAVED HER LIFE thus far. But all anyone ever focused on was how terrible it was that she had a floppy tummy and a curvy middle.
So imagine my non-surprise when Shocking! New! Medical! Research! suggests that maybe we ought to worry about feeding cancer patients since it seems that 20% of them die of malnutrition. Maybe making food interesting and delicious and enticing and high-calorie is important for their health! Maybe food should be rewarding and important and valued, not just blah fuel for the body’s machine (as if we were just shoveling lumps of coal into a cast-iron stove). Maybe our cultural neurosis about assuming that “if it’s delicious, is must be bad and sinful and you should avoid it” and “we know what a balanced diet looks like for all people everywhere all the time” is actually killing people through benign, institutionalized neglect of a basic physical need?
And the shockers keep coming: the myth that sugar feeds cancer doesn’t scare people INTO health, but OUT of it? The fact that “overweight” people who go on chemo sometimes get kudos for weight loss, which, in retrospect, might be kind of a bad idea? You don’t say. I’m pretty sure it’s not just overweight people who “delight at shedding pounds,” but their doctors and family members and friends who give them ya-yas too, since we all know that fat causes cancer and therefore if you get less fat, your cancer will be cured… Except that whoops, the primary conclusion there isn’t right either, but who’s counting?
My cat is, I think, a feline example of the obesity paradox – the reality that being overweight carries a lower mortality risk than being underweight or even “normal weight,” and in fact may provide some cushion against illness and death. Thank goodness she was a “chubby kitty” because she is now 18 years old, and the cancer has not yet taken her from me, and I credit many things for that – the love and bonding we have, the regular vet care I’ve given her, the Prednisone, the good food, maybe even the affectionate bond she developed with Zorya in the past year. But I give big credit to that swingy tummy.
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I have two kitties. Max, who has food allergies and some skin problems, and is a normal-frame “siamese” and Charlie, who is a longhaired tux cat (who has some maine coon in him, as he LOOKS like one, but is too small). When we got Max he was nothing but skin and bones because the shelter hadn’t figured out his food allergies yet.
Max now weighs 15lbs.
Charlie weighs 10-11lbs.
They eat the same amount of the same food (healthy, corn-free, “natural” catfood – due to Max’s allergies), play a lot, chase each other a lot, and get lots of love.
My vet tells me every year that Max should lose weight -the same vet that, two to three times a year, gives him a shot of steroids to clear up his skin infections. I smile and nod, and then on the way home give Max a belly-rub.
Because that chubby tummy? there’s nothing wrong with it. He’s a healthy, active, playful cat that eats the right amount of nutritious catfood (and an occasional piece of stolen people food – the sneak thief!). And while I hope to anything that neither of my cats ever comes down with a disease like cancer or leukemia, I know that I’ve done everything I can to help them be happy and healthy.
Now if only I could have the same attitude about /myself/, you know?
This perfectly echoes what just happened with a friend’s grandmother, who had leukemia. She recently passed away but was able to live for years, largely because she was fat before she got sick. I don’t remember the exact number but I believe she lost about 200lbs. Which means if she hadn’t weighed over 300lbs to begin with she would have wasted away to nothing. Things like this are the entire reason our bodies evolved to store fat, but of course nobody fucking remembers that anymore. *sigh*
I don’t often comment, though I read all the time… I just had to say that I had the EXACT same experience with my sweet childhood companion, my cat Bat Girl (no comments on the name, please – I was seven and she had a “mask” on her face!). She was always round – the doctors tested her for worms I don’t know how many times and constantly gave us the line about “if you can’t feel your cat’s ribs…” – and was part Maine Coon (16 pounds + at her heaviest). But had she not weighed as much as she did during her healthiest years, she would not have had enough energy to tough it out through years of kidney problems. By the end, she was just over 7 pounds. But she had 19 very happy years and even in her last few months when her organs were shutting down she had enough energy to come and sit on my lap and purr. Loudly.
Perhaps obesity is “killing us” all. Then again, perhaps a few extra pounds can help us to live a longer, fuller life. Thank you for the moving post!
Thank you for writing this, Dr. Sheila. My almost-18-yr-old Gingerroot and I send you and Ophelia our best.
Things like this are the entire reason our bodies evolved to store fat, but of course nobody fucking remembers that anymore. *sigh*~Jazzy
I’m 100% with you, Jazzy. Extra fat saves lives, not just human lives, but our pets and in the wild too. Imagine if someone with little extra body fat got lost in the woods and didn’t know how to find/kill food. What would they do? They’d very quickly starve to death. Someone with extra fat isn’t going to waste away as fast and has a better chance of getting out alive.
I love my chub, and my chubby cats too!
I have a cat who’s a big ol’ fatty, and I admit that sometimes I do have health concerns about him. Mostly just because cats carry their weight differently than people do, so it all hangs from his back and I worry that he’ll have problems with that when he’s older.
But I don’t know if that’s a real possibility or if it’s something I’ve made up because it fits with all the other fat “facts” buzzing around.
He’s a midsize cat in terms of his frame, and I think he was 22 pounds when last weighed, so he’s pretty dang fat. My mom restricts his food intake so he’s only getting the recommended amount every day (when he was younger the cats had one of those big free-feed troughs, though) and he tears around the house with the other cat, so I’m pretty sure he’s healthy enough now, but I worry about his bones and joints and I don’t know if I should.
My mother had been overweight almost her entire adult life. All she ever dreamed about was being thin.
When she got cancer she finally lost her weight. At first she loved it and got a ton of compliments. But the weight kept coming off and she no longer looked healthy.
Before she died she said to me “I wish I would have learned to be happy with who I was. I finally got my dream of being thin but I had to die to get here.”
It would be great if people could accept the more curvier of us, our wonderful pets included.
Dr Sheila, our fat cat Biscuit and svelte cat Figment, as well as reforming basement cat Biddy all wish your darling kitty (and you!) all the best, with many purrs and cuddles and belly rubs.
My mom’s cat, Rainbow, who just passed last year, had that swingy tummy thing-I loved it, it made her so cute when she ran. Apparently, some breeds of cat just have an extra fold of skin there that helps them when they have to jump a long distance. It’s not as much belly as it looks like.
*sigh* It’s so sad that the human race couldn’t find enough pleasure in shaming fat humans, so they have to resort to shaming fat animals. It’s ridiculous, it really is. I’ve had various cats in my life, all of whom were happy and beautiful and lived to between 15 and 19 years. I’ve always fed them all the same, that is, when they ask to be fed. They’ve all been pretty normal sized, some a little underweight, some a little over, and they ate the same food either way. It’s entirely dependant on how the cat in question was built to begin with.
I have two right now who eat exactly the same food in nearly the same amounts, and they look very different in build. Because they just are built differently! That’s just -life-.
*sigh* I can’t really come up with anything to add, honestly, because this sort of crap just saddens me.
Thanks for everyone’s comments (and the kitty-lovings). And Tami, I’m really sorry to hear about your mom.
What I don’t want to get lost is that Ophelia, fuzzy baby of mine though she is, is just the metaphor here. What really appalled me was that we are STARVING HUMAN CANCER PATIENTS and I am absolutely certain that there is a direct line between “Obesity Booga Booga!” and this incredibly stupid, tragic, and in many cases perhaps preventable outcome. And on the flip side, we are shaming fat people when in fact their “extra pounds” may someday stand between them and death’s door, rather than ushering them through it as conventional wisdom constantly hammers into us.
My dad has been doing low-carb for years now. He’s had a series of surgeries for various issues (a bad shoulder injury and early-stage prostate cancer) this year and is having trouble recovering well. I wish his doctor would have told him years ago “bag the diet; you need to focus on flexibility and nutrition” because flexiblity might have spared him the injury and nutrition might have at least given him more resiliency to bounce back from the invasive procedures.
Awwww, Ophelia. I’m sorry about her cancer but glad to hear she’s far outlasted her death sentence.
And my cats come in big, bigger, and OH MY GOD size. The OH MY GOD sized cat (Binkley) is the one with the fewest health problems, wouldn’t you know. In fact he really doesn’t have any, other than the odd furball. And all of them are on raw foods plus canned Wellness as a topper, no crunchies at all. So anyone who tells me to put him on a diet can get stuffed.
And yeah, I always wonder if all these people who palaver about “obesity” actually know anyone over the age of 70. Wasting illnesses that cost elderly people dozens of pounds are extremely common, and I’m not buying that they wouldn’t have gotten the wasting illnesses in the first place if they’d been thin. The evidence doesn’t bear that out.
One of my friends in Illinois had a sister who had battled breast cancer and survived for 10 years after losing a breast. Then they did a chest x-ray and found she had cancer again. We took care of her at home (she didn’t want to die in a nursing home), and we fed her the most fattening foods we could find. The cancer invaded her bones and she broke her collarbone just turning over in bed one day. She lived almost 2 years past the second diagnosis of cancer, and when she passed away, she hadn’t lost a pound. Her doctors were amazed that she hadn’t lost any weight, and that she had survived as long as she did.
And yes, Kathryn would have been considered “overweight” when she was diagnosed with cancer the second time (and she was fat the first time, when she fought the breast cancer). So that extra weight can help one survive all kinds of illnesses, so those doctors who think it’s a paradox that fat people survive better really need to quit wearing their asses as hats.
That’s so sad about the cancer patients not being fed properly. It makes sense that the cancers would be thieving energy and nutrients from people’s bodies; it’s a rapidly growing tissue. To not pay attention to nutrition, particularly given the known side effects of the medications is nearly unbelievable.
This study is along the same theme, that ill people need food:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080701171144.htm
The basic conclusion is that following traumatic brain injury, a delay of 5-7 days in putting in a gastric tube icreased death by 2 to 4 times. That every 10 kcal/kg reduction increased mortality by 30 percent. That the minimum needed was 25 kcal/kg and that almost two thirds of patients never met this level of intake at all. If low nutrition causes this many more deaths, even in those who manage to recover, how many would have done better if fed right?
All the kitty stories are great. So sweet and so sad, it’s good to hear how many of them lived long lives despite their illnesses.
Two large, healthy cats have graciously consented to live with me. Jasper looks like he might be part Maine Coon- he’s the spitting image of those Maine Coon kitty calendars except for his size. Yoshi is a tuxedo cat with short, silky fur. Both weigh around 14 pounds.
Nobody ever gives me grief about Jasper. He might have a little extra pudge, but it’s hard to tell under his lovely fluffy coat. Mostly he’s just a large-framed cat. Yoshi has the swingy belly, though. I love his belly! It’s soft and feels good when I rub his tummy. It doesn’t seem to impede his movement, judging by the way both cats go tearing up and down the cat pole. But everyone and their mother comments on what a fat cat Yoshi is! Come ON. He’s mildly pudgy at best. Both cats eat exactly the same food, in the same amounts, no treats or handouts.
I’m pretty sure Yoshi drew the genetic ‘fat’ card. Just like me. It doesn’t bother him a bit. If he should ever end up with a wasting disease (gods forbid!), I will be very thankful that he has those reserves to draw upon.
Mildly OT, but do any other fat cat owners find that your kitty deliberately seeks out the softest places on your body for kneading? My cats seem to love my belly.
Binkley goes straight for the boob. That’s especially festive when I’m getting my period.
This made me cry. My mother died of cancer, officially, but in reality I’m pretty sure she starved to death as a result of chemo-induced nausea. The doctors never seemed to worry much about trying to make sure she got enough to eat, the wasting was simply accepted. When she died she was about 85 pounds. I was only 21 at the time and kind of overwelmed, but if I had it to do over again I’d totally say screw the doctors and get her some weed to smoke, since that’s one of the few things that seems to help with the nausea produced by chemo.
Fast forward nearly 15 years and my cat, always chubby, suddenly gets skinny. At the time I thought this was a good thing and a result of us giving him reduced-calorie food because the vet had been complaining that he was too fat. I literally didn’t realise he was getting too thin until he “crashed” from Chronic Renal Failure. You want to talk about guilt? I projected my own body issues onto my CAT to the point that I failed in my duty to take care of him. Now THAT was a wake up call once I really, objectively looked at the situation. And it made me re-assess a whole lot of thing.
How’s that for a wierd way to come to Fat Acceptance? And yet people do this all the time, project their own body image issues onto their pets, their children, random strangers etc.
I had thyroid cancer which made me gain massive amounts of weight (over half my body weight again in 18 months) – and my mother said “Trust you to get the kind of cancer where you gain weight.” Reading blogs like this one is helping me get over that anti-health body-hate bullshit. I school my doctors and other health practitioners, and most of them (especially the men) are actually far less focused on weight than I would have assumed – and are respectful of my body once pushed a little.
So when my cat (she only weighed about 8 pounds at her heaviest – she’s tiny) started losing weight, I took her to the vet. She was going into renal failure, but because I took her in early, we’ve managed to stabilise her on medication for over 2 years now – the vet has never seen a cat last that long. She’s healthy and lively, though still too thin, and needs lots of teeth cleaning, but I can honestly say that reading posts like this has helped save her life. Human kidney patients? Also more likely to survive if they’re heavy to start with, and if they eat a solid and varied diet.
TR @ 11 – I know a lot of people over 70, all living in their own homes (my town has no nursing home). Being fat does cause one problem – osteoarthritis of the knees – but compared to the problems of the women (and some men) with osteoporosis, I know which one I’d prefer. To be fair, a lot of the thin people were also smokers (and some still are), so it’s not just their weight that is the issue. But the people taking heart, blood pressure and cholesterol medication come in all shapes and sizes.
My cat Lilith also died of intestinal lymphoma after a long struggle. She started out at 16 pounds. She wasn’t just a pleasantly plump kitty, she was outright fat. But by the time the cancer was done with her, she was less than six pounds. I can’t imagine what would have happened to her if she’d originally weighed the ten or so pounds she was supposed to. I’m glad my cat was a fat cat.
My cat is 15 pounds. He’s gone a little soft since he doesn’t have a house to prowl anymore (and a little stir crazy), but he’s always been 15 pounds. The vets were worried, but when you feel him, it’s mostly solid muscle. He’s 10 (11?) and doesn’t quite know his own strength, and when he head butts people for love he can leave bruises. Every vet that’s ever tried to say “ZOMG! Obeeesity” about him has been wrong.
And when we finally have a house again, he’s going to be a holy terror.
CassandraSays – I understand what you mean about projecting my body issues on my cat. When Ophelia first started losing weight, I thought “oh finally; maybe she’s moving around more due to the configuration of our new apartment.” Then she vomited for nearly a week. Finally I took her to the vet who did the ultrasound that revealed both acute pancreatitis (the cause of the vomiting, probably also very painful, oh GUILT) and the intestinal lymphoma that had probably been creeping on for months, causing the starvation that triggered the pancreatitis. And here I thought we were finally achieving what all the vets wanted…
No wonder fat people don’t get care early enough. I can easily imagine a sudden weight drop that produces relief rather than “oh my god, call the doctor because something is wrong!”
RoseCampion – how long did LIlith live? I am so mystified by the course of this illness given our originally-bleak prognosis…
Oooooh, great post, and one dear to my heart. My Siamese kitty, Oatmeal (who went to Kitty Heaven almost a year ago) weighed 16 pounds at her heaviest. She was the cutest, squishiest kitty in the whole wide world. Then she developed a thyroid problem, which we were able to control for awhile with twice-daily meds, but still she lost weight. (Thank goodness she was so good at snarfing up all the tuna fish I gave her every day!)
But at her last visit to the vet, Oatmeal weighed just 3.5 lbs. and that’s one of the reasons I knew she was ready to go – she would not eat or drink anything. The doc said something about force-feeding, and the idea of torturing my frail, 19-year-old kitty by squirting food down her throat made me want to vomit. Better, I thought, to let her go.
When I married my husband, I acquired two step-kitties. One is a slender black and white tailless man who takes himself way too seriously, the other a chubby orange tabby that exists solely for snuggles and playing in his water bowl. I love my orange boy, who walks up to me and flops on his side so I can rub his tummy and scratch his ears. I’d rather let my kitties be well-fed and happy than foist onto them all the societal weight pressures I feel as a human. They’re not worried about the skinny cats in magazines and on TV. They just want lovins.
People always comment on the fact that my dog is a little chubby. I usually just say something like “so am I” and glare.
Seriously, though, it’s none of anyone’s business – just like with people. Not to mention the fact that she eats a normal amount of high quality food (OK, plus some table scraps, if you can get through a whole meal and resist her big brown eyes then we can talk about that) and takes walks every single day (since she’s an NYC dog and has to take a walk just to go out and do her bidness), both benchmarks of healthy dogs.
She lived about nine months or so from diagnosis. That sounds like she didn’t survive as long as your cat has, but cats, like humans, all have different lengths of survival. I suspect that she had it a lot longer than the nine months, because she slowly got slightly skinnier over the course of a couple years. It wasn’t anything drastic, so I just figured it was her getting older.
If you want to talk about the disease, feel free to contact me at writetorosecampion at yahoo dot com.
Dr. Sheila –
My sympathies to you on Ophelia’s health situation. I lost a cat two years ago to chronic illness, so I feel where you’re at.
I also have an obesity-paradox cat. Lizzie was a stray I adopted out of the alley. She was thin and hungry, as alley cats are, and quickly beefed up to 14 pounds. At one of her check-ups, her regular vet wasn’t available, so I got the luck of the draw and was advised to get her weight down as soon! as! possible! The fat-phobic vet advised me to put her on an all-meat diet (no carbs, because carbs ‘make everybody gain weight’).
So I did it. I restricted Lizzie’s food. You know what happened? She got fatter.
So I stopped. That was a year or so ago, and now Lizzie free-feeds on a variety of foods with my other three cats and has ’slimmed down’ to 12 pounds. She’s healthy and happy and active and gets fat when people restrict her food choices.
The end.
MK
I’d say it’s practically impossible to put a cat on a diet. We used to try to feed our old cat only the recommended amount, and she used to literally throw herself against walls until we fed her more. Our current cat, we’re always trying to put weight on her, but if she eats too much she just throws it back up. And cats don’t have any major health problems associated with being overweight anyway, so it is not really an issue.
On the other hand, though, dogs. When we got our pug, who is ten years old, he was 2 kg overweight, which is a lot for a small dog who should only weigh around 10kg. He couldn’t breathe properly, he could only walk a couple of hundred metres, and he was suffering a lot from arthritis in his back legs. Now, having put him on a diet, he can walk a couple of kilometres and still breathe, and his arthritis is a lot less bad. Sometimes it’s not just panic over teh fat, sometimes – and I think particularly with dogs, who do suffer from health problems if they get too fat – it is an actual health issue, and not feeding an animal the right food in the right amount is a form of cruelty. It was much better to restrict our pugsy’s food intake and for him to now be happier and healthier, than to give in when he begs for food (and he is one of those dogs who would eat until he was sick and then would just keep on eating) and let him stay fat and unable to breathe properly and run around.
Of course, it would be much better also not to breed animals that are so bady designed.
I’m so glad your kitty is still hanging on.
My kitten was a very active, thin little cat, and she developed lymphoma of the type you describe at about 2-1/2 years old. She dropped weight tremendously fast, and she was a very small cat to start with. Getting food into her, and ~keeping~ it in her, became my driving concern — I was buying “canned fish for humans” because it was the only thing she’d eat.
She died within three months.
So yeah, all what you said about weight and genetics and such. Your “obese” cat is still with you.
Oh, Ophelia. Good thoughts to her and you, Dr. Sheila.
ITA about the crazy focus on weight over health – people use health to mask the aesthetic desire for thinness a lot of the time, but the mask falls away when dealing with a lot of these end-of-life issues.
Neither fatness nor thinness is universally healthy – starving my fat butt and force-feeding my slim sister-in-law would both be damaging – and using weight as a red herring is just damaging all around. Focusing on all aspects of health, very much including full and complete nutrition, will always help people (and cats). Sadly, the Thin At All Costs mentality utterly ignores the years of evidence that show how some ‘extra’ weight can be of great use.
Sending love your way, for both you and Ophelia.
Ever since learning about Fat Acceptance, I have always wondered about whether one should worry about a pet’s weight. I know certain behaviours like eating non-food items (candles, paper, etc) are symptoms, but often wondered if weight should affect the health of some animals, especially of those who are just on the larger side, like fat people. Guess science still has a long way to go, seeing how pets of all weights live long, healthy and happy lives.
My own little guy is still a kitten – 6 months – so he’s still growing. My friend is still surprised that he eats as much/more than her full-grown papillon and isn’t fat.
How fitting that I come across this post today. My aunt was recently diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. She’s lost about 20 pounds due to nausea/vomitting/chem. Her mom–my grandma–said to her “do you think you’ll be able to keep the weight off?” Now, you don’t know my grandma, but this comment is just the latest in a lifetime of self-hatred and disordered thinking about food and body image that she managed to pass down to her six daughters, two sons, and at least two granddaughters–me and my sister. When I was ten and staying at her house for the summer before moving across the country she would say to me “we’re going to have to roll you to Texas,” while simultaneously shoving food at me. I got the message loud and clear: you are fat and there is something wrong with you. I was ten!!!
So now her daughter is fighting for her life against freaking breast cancer and the only thing she can think is “oh goody, someone in my family lost 20 pounds.”
Wow. This post brought tears to my eyes. I love, LOVE my fatty-paws Fred. He’s 16 soft quishy pounds of love. Actually, he is quite muscular and big-boned, with a layer of fat around his mid-section. He eats exactly the right amount of food per day and gets plenty of exercise chasing our scrawny little Barney cat around all day. I think that with animals, as with peoople, we’re all shaped differently and that’s OK.
My cat Smudgewinkle is a fatty, too. My vet said to restrict her food which I kind of do anyway since she barfs a lot. I can only give her a little bit of food at a time but I don’t restrict the amount she eats. She’s old and cranky she should eat what she wants.
I actually read a book called “If your cat could talk” by a British vet who said that most cats get a tummy pouch and that having a fat kitty is really not a health concern. Since then I haven’t cared about Winkle’s weight. I care about her licking the fur off her stomach but that’s another story.
Smudgewinkle sends purrs and trills to Ophelia and everyone else’s kitties. There’s enough love in our hearts for all kitties who are teh fat. (Sorry to get all mushy.)
Thank you for this.
My cat weighs about 24 pounds. He’s a giant orange cat. He’s fat, yes, but there’s also a lot of muscle, and he’s big in general.
For four years I had him on a strict diet of half a cup of food a day. He lost very little weight, and the vets kept telling me he needed to go lower. Half a cup of food for a 24 pound cat is not much. He was spending most of his time crying for food, and was trying to eat anything he could find- mouldy food in the garbage, days old plain string beans, and even paper.
I’ve had so many lectures on his weight from vets. I’ve been told off for having him an indoor cat, even though indoor cats live four times longer, and I’ve always lived right on busy roads. Plus, I care about native wildlife. Last time he was an outdoor cat, he got an infected abcess from fighting. I actually think there might be something medically wrong with him, but no vet will take me seriously because I’m fat.
A few months ago, I decided to relax his food. For the first time in four years, he’s not obsessed with food. He eats a bit, then leaves when he’s full. He rarely tries to steal food. He doesn’t cry all the time.
He’s also a seriously active cat- we live with another cat, and they spend most of their day playing. But no one believes me.
My cat has taught me to love my body and not be ashamed of it. He has also taught me that what we’re taught about dieting and weight isn’t true- it’s not just bloody calories in, calories out!
Aww, this made me all weepy. What and amazing and sad and cute story. I hope that she stays with you for a long time, and that her pain is as little as possible.