On the Importance of Food

Let me tell you my life's motto: eat, eat, and eat again, for tomorrow you may find yourself on a diet. It is a hard-earned lesson that life has taught me through much suffering and deprivation.

When I was a kitten, I didn't have a care in the world. I played with my toys all day long, I galloped around the house, I woke my human several times during the night so that she would pet me while I snacked on my bowl of dry food. My food bowl was never empty. Life was good.

Before I knew it, a year had passed, and it was time for the annual TED visit. For those of you kitties out there who've been lucky enough never to meet this sinister individual, TED stands for The Evil Doctor. It's a human who will manhandle you, poke you with needles, force open your mouth to look at your teeth, and will generally inflict various indignities upon your person. And all with the full consent and cooperation of your own human!

As I was saying, my human took me to my annual TED visit. At that time I was only a little over a year old. A teenager, with a normal teenager's energy and appetite. Or so my human and I thought. We soon found out we were mistaken. TED put me on the scale and exclaimed: "He weighs 7.75 kg!" (That's about 17 pounds to you North American kitties.) She was quite upset and told my human that my ideal weight was 6 kg (about 13 pounds). She ordered my human to put me on a diet. I didn't know what the word "diet" meant, but I did not like the sound of it. It gave me a kind of hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I was soon to discover how right I was to fear the evil word. After that fateful TED visit, on the recommendation of the evil vet, my human started depriving me of food!!! She would only give me 1/3 cup of dry food per meal. At 3 meals a day, that meant I had to live on one measly cup of food per day! That wasn't enough to even fill my food bowl! How can a growing boycat live on that, I ask you?

And it's not like I was that big. True, when I walked my tummy would sway from side to side, and when I lay down I looked like a big, fuzzy, kitty-shaped inflatable beach toy... And it was getting a bit difficult for me reach some parts of my fur while I was washing myself... But I wasn't fat! I was just big-boned and... fluffy. Yes, that's the word! I was fluffy! It was just my long fur which was making me look bigger! Honest! And the vet's scale was probably broken, anyway! Broken, I tell you!

I don't need a diet! Give me more food! Food! Food! Food!

Alas, my human did not listen to my numerous logical arguments in favour of keeping my bowl constantly full. She did not crumble at my piteous pleas for more food. Even when I howled loudly in her ear just as she was drifting off to sleep, or when I led her to my sadly empty food bowl and looked at her with pleading eyes, she did not relent.

Goodbye, overflowing bowl of kibble! Goodbye, midnight snacks of canned Iams! Goodbye, tasty bits of human food sneaked under the dinner table! I hardly knew ye...

I will spare you the many horrible details of my dieting ordeal. Suffice it to say that, if indeed suffering builds character, I must be the cat with the finest character in the history of the feline race. It was not all bad, however. Fortunately for me, there were other people living in the house besides my unrelenting human. Some of them were much more tenderhearted, and could be prevailed upon to provide me with snacks behind my human's back. Through much trial and error, I developed several fool-proof methods for supplementing my diet, which served me so well that it took me over 3 years to lose enough weight to satisfy TED. (I will share with you my proven strategies for getting food from unwilling humans in my next posting.)

I know that a lot of us cats like to pretend that we are picky eaters. It is a way to keep humans on their toes, to prevent them from taking us for granted. It is a way to show our superiority over the d-things (d*gs), who will eat anything and everything. That is all well and good. But my advice to you, cats and kittens, is this: eat! Eat as much as you can, as often as you can. Eat until you're so full you can barely move. Eat until you fall asleep with your face in the food bowl.

You never know when your human might decide to put you on a diet, whether you think you need it or not.