Remission: A Second Chance to get it right

I view Buddy’s apparent remission as a second chance for Buddy and for us, to get it right.

We must remove the factors that contribute to his Type 2 diabetes, because otherwise he will soon be right back at needing external insulin.

The factors are specifically:

• Buddy is overweight by about 5 pounds.
• For 10 years, his diet was mostly “premium” dry food.
• Dry food has a lot of carbohydrates. Cats are “obligate carnivores”, and they do not benefit from getting calories from carbohydrates. – they need to get their calories from fat and protein. Ideally, from animal fat and animal protein.

What we are doing about that

1. No more dry food!
2. Weight loss program for Buddy, with the goal to achieve his ideal weight, safely.

How we are doing this

No more dry food:

We switched the kitties to a diet of canned and pouched wet food (no gravy wet food – too many starches (carbs) ). They get food that contains high quality animal protein and animal-source fats – usually commercial and sometimes homemade – raw and cooked – wet food.

Safe weight loss program

Buddy is on a restricted calorie diet – around 260 kcal every 24 hours (for example, 3 small cans of TikiCat After Dark – at 87 kcal each that gets us to approximately 261 kcal. We fill his microchip-activated feeder 3 times a day, and he “grazes” throughout the day.

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I won’t at this moment try to deep-dive into how a body (human or feline) builds glucose molecules (and therefore “blood sugar”) from fat and protein, and how dietary carbs quickly raise the blood sugar and put increased demand on the body to produce insulin, and how especially short-chained carbs create a rollercoaster of high blood sugar levels followed by high insulin levels, followed by low blood sugar levels – followed by the body’s various emergency activities to raise that blood sugar quickly to prevent death (directly or due to incapacitation) from too low of a blood sugar. Those activities include hunger (and craving for quick carbs (Sweet things) in humans), leading to weight gain which leads to increased resistance to insulin, which requires more insulin than before to regulate the blood sugar, which means higher levels of insulin in the blood – which next to other serious problems also facilitates weight gain (insulin is also an anabolic hormone) – all of it working together in an nasty positive feedback loop to increase the individual’s risk to get – years later – a diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes.

… a trip to the “breakfast aisle” – looking at the boxes of cereals marketed as “healthy ways to start your day” in any American grocery store explains the Type 2 Diabetes epidemic in a nutshell, when you look at it from that perspective.

Ok, this was a bit of a soapbox paragraph. Google “Metabolic Syndrome X” for further reading, if interested. I am an engineer and not a doctor, and I am fully aware that I have not addressed the finer points of genetic predisposition, food quality and identity, individual factors concerning metabolism, and physical activity in the above opinion piece.