Hi Dan, a couple of things—it sounds like your male cat might benefit from a limited ingredient diet or some sort of highly-digestible product, such as the ones on our list of the best food for cats with IBD. I suspect that a raw diet might be more digestible and help to sort out that diarrhea issue. Secondly, your female cat’s ideal weight is an individual question, and I’d recommend using our cat weight calculator to determine her ideal weight and how many calories she should be eating each day to reach it. Hope this helps. – Mallory

First the male can be picky about eating at times, we believe due to his stomach, he constantly has very sweet smelling liquid poops, the vet put him on probiotics that didn’t do anything to help. We’re thinking that whatever is wrong is preventing him from properly absorbing his food. He is still very active, loves to play, and cuddle, but will ask for extra food at times.

Second our female, we have cut her food intake down, but as I said she isn’t very active or playful (this was her personality even as a kitten). Beyond this we aren’t sure what we can do to help her. We live out in the country in the US where most cats are kept as outdoor “barn cats”. So not many people take their pets to the vet like we do. The only advice we can get from the vet is to buy the Hills Science Diet they sell.

My wife use to work for a holistic animal store and I worked for a large animal shelter, we both know that Purina basically wrote the books they use in US veterinary school and the vets make a lot of extra money here for selling you said low quality animal food. We have always fed our cats a high quality food with little to no fillers and don’t feel very comfortable feeding them something that isn’t as good for them and is very marked up in price.

Is there any advice beyond what we’ve gotten already you could offer? For the female taking after a larger breed of cat what should her healthy weight be (vet puts it as the same as a female DSH). Any advice would be much appreciated. Thank you.

Hi Denisa, that’s right! So if your kitten weighs 4 lbs, they’ll need about 260 calories per day. That’s 130 calories per meal if you’re feeding two meals per day. Alternatively, a LOT of people prefer to free-feed kittens of this age, because they are often insatiable just as you described, and very frequent feedings are preferable to just two meals a day. At least three daily meals are recommended! If you’re feeding wet food and can’t be present to provide that many meals, you might want to set out an automatic feeder that reveals a fresh meal every few hours or put out frozen food and let it thaw over the course of the day.

May I only clarify one thing? In the chart, you say a 4-month old kitten should be fed 60-65 cal per their weight per day. And that you should feed them every 8 hours. Let’s say I feed my kitten 2 times a day. Do I understand correctly that I take the recommended calories intake per day and split it by 2 to get the servings right?

(Im sorry for such a questions, but Im feeding a small sphynx kitten and it just seems to finish everything, not leaving a single piece in the bowl, and is super impatient to get another serving, which made me doubt I provide it with enough calories 🙁

Thank you!

Hi Angelo, I see what you mean. I believe the chart was revised to correct an error at some point and things might have gotten mixed up. I’ll look into it but, in the meantime, you can use this calculator to determine the best feeding amount for your cat. It also helps you determine how much to feed based on the calorie content of the food:
https://cats.com/weight-calculator?results

Based on the chart here, I should be feeding them at least 60 * body weight, so 480 cal and 720 cal per day.
Based on the formula in the other article: 70 * weight_in_kg ^ 0.75 * 1.3, (I picked 1.3 since they are both indoor), and I got 240 cal and 325 cal. They are half of the calories from previous calculation.

Just wondering which formula should I follow. Thanks

Hi Carrie! I would recommend checking your cat’s body composition using this tool to determine whether or not your cat is at a healthy weight. If you’d like to switch to a wet food, the first step making sure to dole out controlled portions rather than letting her free-feed on a big bowl of dry food. Serving small portions of dry food throughout the day will get your cat used to eating whatever you give her at mealtime, so it’ll be easier to start mixing in some wet food gradually. Hope this helps!

Hello Carrie! That’s a great question. For the most accurate results, I’d recommend using our cat food and weight calculator here.