{"id":1823,"date":"2017-11-20T13:42:28","date_gmt":"2017-11-20T12:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tatzenladen.aix-dev.de\/?p=1823"},"modified":"2026-07-14T17:03:37","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T15:03:37","slug":"serving-sizes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tatzenladen.de\/en\/serving-sizes\/","title":{"rendered":"Serving Sizes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\"\"\"\"\n

\nServing sizes for adult cats<\/strong>
\nAny recommendations on serving sizes we can make can only be a good guess – a starting point to use in your play with your cat\u2019s portion sizes and mealtime frequency. Determining your cat\u2019s ideal daily portion size is unfortunately not as easy as a chart which tells you: if your cat weighs this much, feed her that amount. Cats are individuals. Some are big, but thin. Others are small, but fat. They are young and old, male and female, active or sedate, and more. Some have fast metabolism and others don\u2019t. Any chance of providing you with a simple chart is made more difficult by the fact, that a homemade diet will turn out differently with the meat you use and with how precisely you follow instructions. Some customers use lean poultry, other use fatty beef. A fatty beef diet will be more filling and calorie dense than the same volume of a lean turkey diet. Some customers add more water, giving the food more volume but not more calories, while others omit water and wonder why their cats gain weight on so little food.

\nCaregivers are often distressed about their cat\u2019s behavior of finishing their plate in less than a minute, asking for more food, pestering them at the fridge, or taking food stuff off counters or out of the trash, prompting them to think that their cat is starving or lacking something! Some cats don\u2019t do this, but most will not miss an opportunity to eat. It is natural for an animal to be opportunistic, and this is part of their instinct to survive. However, much of this is conditioning: how your cat was raised and how your cat has trained you!

\n\nFood requirement should be based entirely on body condition, and not on behavior. <\/strong>If your cat suddenly looses weight without changes in the diet, consult with your Veterinarian about possible illness or internal parasites.

\nIt is especially difficult to monitor food intake and its effects on a cat allowed outdoors. Outdoors, your cat can regurgitate food without you knowing, and all you notice is that he or she is loosing weight. The eating of mice and other prey will add calories, but also predispose your cat to intestinal parasites. Outdoor, cats will often travel long distances, which takes extra calories. Outdoor, cats may scavenge food from neighbors, which puts them at a great risk not only from weight gain.

\nOur suggestions are to feed a daily portion of 130 g \u2013 175 g as two or three meals every day<\/strong>
\nUnless you have a very large cat, like a young, active, outdoor, male Main Coon cat, or a crazy Siamese, 99% of cats will fall into this portion range. Some older, more sedate cats will actually gain weight on that amount of food a day.

\nCats are individuals. <\/strong> Some will maintain a level of excitement about food throughout their live. Others are largely uninterested in eating, and need coaxing to eat even as kittens. Most cats do well eating three meals every day, but some are not interested in eating more often than twice every day; sometimes they only show enthusiasm for one meal per day. Other cats will eat anything, any time, for no reason. Cats\u2019 personality and emotional state is very much expressed by how they eat.

\nCats of the genus Felis, including the domestic cat, are adapted to prey on rodents, small birds, and the occasional reptile and amphibian as the main staple of their natural diet. A single mouse weighs no more than 30 gram, providing approximately 60 kcal. In order to meet their daily caloric requirement, cats must eat an average of five prey animals every day. This amount of food is not consumed all as one meal, but as separate meals throughout the day as the cats succeed in catching that prey. Field observations have concluded that most small cat species are adapted to and prefer to be active during dusk and dawn – the time when they will hunt most of their prey – resulting in an intake of several smaller \u201cmeals\u201d during these hours. Naturally, cats will rest, groom, doze, or sleep during daytime hours.

\nWhile we can draw some practical insight from the natural model, feeding five meals of 30 gram each to our cats during the morning and evening hours is hardly a possible solution for most of us. Our personal experience has been that cats do very well eating two meals every day of 50 g \u2013 70 g each.

\nWeighing your cat’s serving is a good tool, because we have a natural tendency to over-feed\nRegurgitation of food can be almost entirely abolished by feeding meal sizes not exceeding 35 g, and to feed the daily requirement as 3-4 meals. Young, large, active cats who require more than 140 g of food every day should be given an extra meal rather than increasing the size of their meal.

\nThe stomach of a cat is about the size of a walnut when empty. It can stretch, but trying to fit a 115 g of food into it as one meal, is \u201cover-stretching\u201d it a bit. Saliva and digestive juices will add additional volume. A cat will not always select instinctively what he or she needs and how much.

\nCats are individuals. While we can give you guidelines, none of our suggestions will work for everyone. Cats are a joy and a challenge all in one. They are a challenge especially when feeding them. So specialized in what they would naturally eat. One thing is certain, though: if you invite a carnivore into your life that eats meat, it is not going to be cheap.

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Serving sizes for adult cats Any recommendations on serving sizes we can make can only be a good guess – a starting point to use in your play with your cat\u2019s portion sizes and mealtime frequency. Determining your cat\u2019s ideal daily portion size is unfortunately not as easy as a chart which tells you: if […]\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1845,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tatzenladen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1823"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tatzenladen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tatzenladen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tatzenladen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tatzenladen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1823"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.tatzenladen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4565,"href":"https:\/\/www.tatzenladen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1823\/revisions\/4565"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tatzenladen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tatzenladen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tatzenladen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tatzenladen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}