Thank you!

(PS – just bought your book for my Kindle – can’t wait to read it.

You might want to look into the research being done on other causes of obesity in cats as well as other mammals. Lab mice, street rats and human infants have ballooned in recent years, which suggests there is more to it than too many carbs, lack of exercise or lack of “willpower.” Sharon Begley wrote a small article in a December issue of Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/12/10/what-fat-animals-tell-us-about-human-obesity.html
Anecdotally, my two cats (sisters) eat the same food. One is lithe and fit while the other, who has some attachment/insecurity issues, has been gaining weight, which appears to be secondary to lying around all the time and seeking food about ten times a day. I really wonder whether we are all ingesting or absorbing something that is disrupting many of our serotonin systems. At any rate, most phenomena in biology are multifactorial.

My cats will EATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT and not stop. I have no idea why. But they will eat any ad everything. They’re always on the prowl for food.

I use to feed them the directed amount on the cans, but it was oto much because that’s what caused them to gain weight in the first place. So now I have two pleasantly plump kitties (over a year old now). I’ve taken their food portions down to 4 ounces a day, since they aren’t particularly big cats, one about 10-11lbs and the other at least a pound or two smaller than her brother.

Do you have any advice, since what has happened to my cats seem to go against what you wrote about? And yes, they’ve always been on Innova EVO canned food (they’ve never had dried food) except when they were kittens (I had then on Wellness canned then). Also, I dont feed them treats or table scraps or anything like that. But I’m getting very worried about them.

It’s actually more specific to say cats lack the enzymes to complete digestion of sugars and starches. Without the proper enzymes to break it down, carbs are digested to the point where they become blood sugar. Since cats are designed to run on ketones, not sugar, the cat’s pancreas produces insulin, which turns the blood sugar into fat; the same process as in humans.

Cats are very slow to burn their fat; in the wild, they wouldn’t get much in the way of carbs. They also would be slow to put on fat with their natural diet. In fact, if a cat has to rely exclusively on their stored fat, they can damage their liver. Cat’s fat storage works to supplement poor hunting, not substitute for it.

This is why cats fed too many carbs are so prone to diabetes. The cat’s pancreas gets overwhelmed with the demand, and begins to malfunction. Obesity is a symptom of the system imbalance that leads to diabetes; not the cause.