美国国家公共电台 NPR For Fat Cats, The Struggle Is Real When It Comes To Losing Weight And Keeping It Off（在线收听）

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Imagine sleeping much of the day, never going outdoors, and crying for food at all hours. That pretty much sums up the life of a cat - or BJ Leiderman, who writes our theme music - or more to the point of this story, the fat cat. It's estimated that more than half the indoor cats in this country are overweight. Now researchers are looking for ways to help felines slim down. Robbie Harris reports from member station WVTF.

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ROBBIE HARRIS, BYLINE: Erin Shibley and Chirag Rathod are cat parents to Miko.

ERIN SHIBLEY: Miko Angelo.

CHIRAG RATHOD: Miko Angelo is his full name, yes. Miko for short.

HARRIS: It's dinner time at their apartment in Blacksburg, Va.

SHIBLEY: It's like...

RATHOD: A random panini.

SHIBLEY: It's inspired by tomato soup and grilled cheese.

HARRIS: Smells delicious, and it's a signal to Miko that it's his mealtime, too.

SHIBLEY: So he is a vacuum eater, which means that he will just inhale his food. And it was really bad before we started the study.

HARRIS: The study at Virginia Tech's College of Veterinary Medicine looked at how to keep indoor cats at a healthy weight. They did weekly check-ins and used a special low-calorie high-nutrition food. Dr. Lauren Dodd was a resident in clinical nutrition during the yearlong project.

LAUREN DODD: Yes, we just go ahead and weigh him.

HARRIS: Miko was an ideal candidate - no illnesses and a bit chunky.

SHIBLEY: I used to just kind of, like, share whatever I was eating with him if he wanted it, which was really bad. And throughout the study, he would come up to me and try and take my food. And I felt like a monster because I'd say no.

HARRIS: Megan Shepard, clinical nutrition professor at the vet school, has heard all about these struggles and knows who usually wins.

MEGAN SHEPHERD: It's not hard to overfeed them with the food is love culture.

HARRIS: Sure, some felines can self-regulate when it comes to food. But most indoor cats need help keeping the pounds off. And this study that was, yes, sponsored by Purina, is testing how best to do that. It starts with an assessment on the body weight scale. A score of one is emaciated, and nine is obese.

SHEPHERD: And there are pets that leave the scale. We definitely have pets that become a nine plus, plus, plus.

HARRIS: When Shibley and Rathod brought Miko in, they thought he might be a seven. Turned out, he was a nine, a sobering realization. First change, saying goodbye to all-day grazing. But cat owners know they have ways of making their needs heard - wailing all night or jumping on heads, keeping everyone else from sleeping. One cat in the study ate a whole bag of gluten-free bread in protest.

SHEPHERD: If you have a cat that is, like, screaming for food and yet we still need to keep those calories restricted...

HARRIS: Shepherd says try feeding them vegetables. Yup, one of the biggest takeaways of this study is that cats will and should eat veggies. But Dodd says it's the connection between pets and their people that's the biggest factor in successful weight loss. One woman with a cat in the study decided to diet along with her pet.

DODD: Her cat needed to lose. She needed to lose. And so it was kind of like, you know, that social support where she was able to tell her cat no because if she couldn't eat, cat couldn't eat either.

HARRIS: We checked in with Miko Angelo a few months later, and his new program is working.

SHIBLEY: He tends to beg for food. So he actually might be doing a little bit worse this week because my little sister is visiting, and she's been giving him salmon.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I gave him, like, two little slivers of salmon. And I felt guilty about it. I was like, I know that he's been doing so good. And he's about to be interviewed. And I gave him a treat. But he's so cute. He's got those big eyes.

HARRIS: And we all know what that's like. But for felines and humans, it's not just about losing the weight. It's keeping it off.

For NPR News, I'm Robbie Harris in Blacksburg, Va.

(SOUNDBITE OF BLUE IN GREEN'S "BLUE WIND")