Keep Your Cat Healthy and Active with a Proper Diet

If you want to do one thing to help your cat right now, it should be this: look at the ingredients of her food. If animal by-products and corn are near the top of that list, your cat is not eating right. Blue Buffalo Co. offers a cat food comparison tool to quickly find out. This is how incredible the difference was for our cat, after we realized Healthful Life wasn't so "healthful" after all:

Ingredients for Purina Cat Chow - Healthful Life Cat Food (source):

Chicken by-product meal, corn gluten meal, ground yellow corn, soybean meal , ground wheat

Ingredients for Blue Buffalo Co. - BLUE Longevity for Adult Cats (source):

Deboned Whitefish, Salmon Meal, Whole Ground Brown Rice, Menhaden Fish Meal, Peas

Please keep in mind that your cat is an obligate carnivore; even more so than dogs, cats must eat plenty of meat/fish to be healthy. Four out of the five main ingredients in the Purina food are not meat. And the fifth, animal by-product, is disgusting enough to hardly even count. This should make alarm bells go off in your head, like when you pick up an item from a store shelf and find that the first ingredient is sugar and the second is corn syrup.

Including canned "wet" food in your cat's diet is also vital. It is much closer to the prey they'd be catching naturally than the processed hard food. Ideally, a diet of meat stored in your freezer and thawed when needed would be best, but the canned food is a much more practical alternative. It's a little more work, but you needn't feed your cat canned food every day. Currently, our cat gets wet food three times a week.

The number of overweight cats you can find in households across the country is obscene. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a country with extensive weight problems in its human population also has many overweight pets! Strictly follow the feeding guidelines found on the packaging. Generally speaking, your cat should be eating less than a cup of dry food per day or no more than one can of wet food per day. This is crucial to her health and longevity.

Free feeding is also frowned upon for the most part. This may not be the most important change you could make in your cat's eating routine, but it is beneficial. Decrease the amount of food you leave out during the day so that your cat is hungry when you get home and will eat a meal then. You may feel sorry for her at first, but she will be healthier and happier in the long run. It's also a nice experience to come home to your cat greeting you because she knows you're going to feed her. After feeding her just a few scheduled meals, our cat learned exactly what time we wake up in the morning-she's turned into a nice, soothing supplement to the alarm clock.

So please feed your little furry (or not-so-furry) friend right. It may be a bit more costly and a tiny bit more work, but you will notice a difference in your cat's happiness-and save on vet bills in the long run.