Let's move onto something a little lighter, shall we?

Well, "lighter" is a figurative term…you see, Sophie's body max index has been an ongoing project in our lives.

She came to us as a scrawny malnourished rescue kitten. She was all length and no width; she looked pitiful. We left a bowl of food out for her at all times to eat whenever she saw fit. Cats are supposed to know when they are not really hungry anymore and stop, after all.

By her second year checkup with the vet, she had filled out drastically. She was still growing however, so we thought it was a phase. Not to mention, she is a larger cat breed. By year three however, she was officially overweight, weighing in at 17 pounds. I have to interject, for the sake of Sophie, that during that year we identified medical problems that require her to be on prescription cat food that is much higher in fat content.

But even with that interjection…Sophie doesn't eat; she inhales.

She was left to her own devices for too long in the wild and never lost the scavenger mentality. Nick and I had to be a lot more active in her diet by veterinary proclamation, or we were going to have a (fuzzy) walking beach ball on our hands.

All of her portion sizes have been reduced, and she eats from an automatic feeder that disperses a portion at 8:00 AM and midnight. I get home from work at 4:30 PM, and I give her a small portion of wet food for her evening meal. The vet warned us that putting a cat on a diet is much worse than any human on a diet, and boy he wasn't kidding.

In the beginning, she'd nag us to feed her, tripping us as she wound around our ankles. Eventually, when we didn't give in, she'd up and bite us. She got nasty all around. She'd run in from another area of the condo and head straight toward one of us to take a meaty nip from our legs. In case you don't already know this: cats like to be the boss. They constantly challenge authority.

Needless to say, when those feeding times hit, she is an eating machine. Nick and I have separated ourselves from the dry food with that automatic feeder (she now chews on that thing instead of us), but she still relies on us for the afternoon wet food. She is the pestiest of all pests when I walk in the door…and for what? Moments after I put her food down, it's gone. I doubt she even tastes it.