BEST WAY FOR KIDS TO LOSE WEIGHT

James is getting better with the assistance of a stomach feeding tube (see previous photo) He has to be fed every 4 hours, through the tube, a special mixture of moist high protein dog food that has been puree'd with water in a blender. He's slowly eating solid food -- mainly tuna.

The vet thinks all of this was caused by the trama of evacuating for Hurricane Rita. Stress causes some cats not to eat, and when they dont eat, obviously they start to develop health problems. I noticed a few weeks ago he wasn't eating normal amounts, but when you have three cats, its hard to moniter exactly how much each one is eating.

He is still very jaundiced from the liver problems caused by his refusal to eat -- as you can see by the yellow color of his mouth.

More about feline Hepatic Lipidosis:

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Hepatic Lipidosis in Cats

Hepatic lipidosis is literally fat infiltration into liver cells. When it is severe, it can cause severe problems, including death of affected cats.

Hepatic lipidosis occurs for any reason that forces a cat to begin to metabolize its own body fat rather than energy from food. As far as we know, this disorder probably does not occur as a primary problem. It is usually secondary to something else which causes the cat not to eat. It is more
common in obese cats because they tend to metabolize fat more readily than thinner cats. Cats do not metabolize fat well. So the fat globules build up in a "backlog" in the cell, eventually making it unable to perform its normal functions at all.

There are many many things which will cause a cat not to eat for a several days, however most often it caused by severe stress, such has moving to a new house. In many cases, the original cause of the not eating is gone when hepatic lipidosis becomes a problem. In other cases, it is necessary to find and correct the original problem in order to succeed in treating hepatic lipidosis.

The only successful treatment that we know of for this disease is to ensure that the cat ingests sufficient calories to make it unnecessary for him to metabolize fat. Cats with hepatic lipidosis do not usually feel like eating. Therefore, it is usually necessary to force feed them in some way.

The most consistently successful approach is to implant a stomach tube through their body wall and feed them through the stomach tube. It make take several months to reach the point a cat will eat on its own again. Many people are reluctant to implant stomach tubes and try to force feed orally or use appetite stimulants. Sometimes this works. Usually when it doesn't work, the cat is
much worse off and it may be too late to take the other approach.

This is a difficult disease for all family members. At present, the consensus of estimates seems to be that 70 to 80% of cats will recover from this condition if aggressively managed (i.e.-if they are fed adequate calories by whatever method it takes to get them in).