There's no two ways about it; Grace is too fat.
For years we have just hoped she'd lose weight. We tried diet cat food, but she only ate more of it, and kept on gaining weight, while Nick and Nora started losing weight and resorted to eating their prey to survive.
I don't know why it never dawned on us to move the food bowl. We are just dumb that way sometimes. We were standing around in the kitchen, talking about how fat Grace is, too fat to jump up on the counter or anything ... suddenly it dawned on us that we could just put the dry food bowl up on the counter, thus regulating Grace's diet, while letting Nick and Nora eat to their heart's content. Duh.
Yes. We let Nick and Nora eat on the counter. We love them.
We give our cats a little mushy food (wet cat food) for breakfast and supper (mainly to get them to come inside), and they have dry food all day to snack on. This works for most cats, but not for Grace. Grace maintains that she doesn't have an eating problem -- she has no problem at all eating and eating and eating.
Susan told me once that Grace was normal-sized when Brenda got her, but after Brenda got Zak, her poodle, and Grace started living in the closet upstairs, she started to gain weight. I remember going over to Brenda's to work on her computer, and Grace was fine, normal sized, and Brenda was amazed at how friendly she was to me, because Grace didn't usually do that.
Then Brenda died, and I offered to take Grace, because I wanted to keep a little bit of Brenda, and I figured no one would want to take Grace. Grace, by that time, had issues that went beyond her weight issues.
Anyway, time passed, Grace was continuously happy, there were no dogs, and the food was plentiful. Until two days ago. Now she is unhappy. She keeps looking up at the far-away counter top and she can see the food there. Besides her mushy food (which now has to have her medicine mixed in with it), she gets a very small amount of crunchy food morning and afternoon. It's only five pieces, mostly given just to appease her sense that she had something. She walks around the house and cries for food every now and then, which makes my heart break, but I'm not giving in.
The good news is that she gets more exercise because she's continuously walking back and forth, trying to get food, instead of lying in the sun like a beached whale, snoring. I think she'll start losing weight soon. She has to, to be able to jump up on the counter ....
