How much should I feed my cat and how often?

Cats evolved to eat many small meals a day — a wild cat's natural pattern is roughly a dozen tiny kills. That is why a cat fed two large bowlfuls often begs constantly and still gains weight, and why the same daily amount split across more meals produces a settled cat. The arithmetic is not difficult, but almost nobody does it, because packaging encourages you to eyeball it instead.

Safety

What you'll need

• Kitchen scales
• The calorie figure on the food packaging
• The cat's weight from the vet's scales (optional)
• A timed feeder or puzzle feeder (optional)

Step by step

1. Get an accurate weight for the cat.Weigh yourself, then yourself holding the cat, and take the difference — or use the practice scales, which most vets are happy for you to do. A hundred grams matters on a four-kilogram animal.
2. Find the energy figure on the packaging.It is usually printed as kilocalories per hundred grams, or per pouch or tin, often in small print near the composition. This is the number the arithmetic needs, and it varies enormously — wet food is mostly water, so it has far fewer calories per gram than dry.
3. Use the manufacturer's daily need figure as your starting point.Every reputable food states a daily amount for a cat of a given weight, and that is the sensible starting figure. Your vet will give you a more accurate target for a cat that is overweight, underweight, elderly or has a health condition.
4. Divide the daily energy need by the food's energy density.If the food gives 80 kcal per 100g and the daily target is 200 kcal, the cat needs 250g of that food a day. Change food and this number changes, which is why swapping brand without recalculating so often causes weight gain.
5. Split it into at least four meals.Four to six small meals suits a cat's natural pattern far better than two large ones. A timed feeder handles the ones you are not there for, and it stops the dawn wake-up call as effectively as anything.
6. Make some of it work rather than a bowlful.Puzzle feeders and scattered dry food turn eating into hunting, which is a genuine need. It also slows fast eaters down, which reduces the regurgitation people mistake for vomiting.
7. Keep water well away from the food.Cats naturally avoid drinking beside a kill. A wide shallow bowl or a fountain, in a different room from the food, measurably increases intake — and cats on dry food need to drink considerably more than cats on wet.
8. In a multi-cat house, feed cats separately.Free-feeding a shared bowl means one cat is almost always eating the other's share, and you lose the ability to notice that one has stopped eating. Separate rooms, separate times, or microchip-operated feeders solve it properly.
9. Check the body condition monthly.You should feel the ribs under a thin covering without pressing, see a slight waist from above, and find only a small primordial pouch of loose skin on the belly, which is normal and not fat. Adjust by around ten per cent and reassess after a month.

Tips

• Wet and dry food are not interchangeable by weight. Two hundred grams of pouches and two hundred grams of kibble are wildly different amounts of food, because kibble is roughly four times more energy-dense.
• If your cat wakes you at five in the morning, a timed feeder set for four is usually a more effective solution than anything you can do to the cat.
• A cat that suddenly becomes ravenous, or suddenly fussy, is telling you something medical. Both are worth a vet call rather than a change of brand.

Common mistakes

• Leaving a full bowl of dry food down permanently — You lose all visibility of how much is being eaten, which is the earliest sign of illness in a species that hides illness well, and most cats overeat when food is constantly available.
• Not recalculating after switching food — Energy density varies several-fold between foods. The same weight of a richer food is a substantially larger meal, and this is a common cause of quiet weight gain.
• Crash-dieting an overweight cat — Rapid weight loss in cats can trigger serious liver disease. Weight reduction has to be slow and supervised by a vet.

If it doesn't work

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