My male cat weights about 7kgs. He is about 12years old. Is this healthy? What can i do to reduce his weight!?

Question

My male cat weights about 7kgs. He is about 12years old. Is this healthy? What can i do to reduce his weight!?

Answer 1

some cats naturally weigh this much ( bigger breeds) and boys tend to be bigger

and being older and male he will naturally have a little bit of a paunch (belly hang)

i would not be overly worried, but at 12 y.o. maybe change him to senior food.. which is a little lower in calories as at that age they are less active than a younger cat.

Answer 2

Hey, this site helped me. It was my first port of call when i wanted to know about pets weight: http://www.petsgetslim.co.uk/weight_clin...

You can enter your cats details and have a look at what his weight should be. You can also check his body condition (basically the shape of him) to check if he should be that shape.

Its more on shape rather than weight in my experience if you can feel their ribs then they should be ok. Also remember that older cats tend to put on weight easier and that boys are generally larger anyway. They also lack exercise in older age.

I would advise you to get a vet to do a check up and yearly weigh-in when he gets his vaccinations. They can advise you on feeding, exercise and everything you need to know.

Hope this helps x

P.S. for extra info you can use this WellCatLog (under sickness logs) to keep a record of everything (including weight) about your cat. I have found this extremly helpful. Just download it for free (its a PDF file), print it and fill it out. http://www.fabcats.org/wellcat/publicati...

Answer 3

My male cat is very overweight too. I put him on diet food for a year and he didn't lose any weight even though we fed him exactly the amount what the vet said.

Answer 4

It depends on the overall size of the cat. If you have a big bone structured cat, this could be okay.  I have a male cat that's 13 yr and he's 17.5 pounds. The vet said that this is an okay size for him, but not anything bigger because he has a large frame (his head is huge).

You can try decreasing the cat's food, but go slow and don't cut back too much to quickly because they can develope health problems if you do, like fatty liver syndrome and such.  If you free feed, stop, and begin measuing his food and only feeding him like 2 or 3 times a day.  It works because my big cat used to be 22 pounds.  It took like 2 to 3 years to get his weight down, but a pound in a cat is a lot of weight.