Reasons NOT to Free Feed Your Cat.

Do you keep your cat’s bowl of kibble filled all day long letting them eat whenever they want?
Once you know about how cats digest their food, you might want to change your feeding style.

It is their nose, not their mouth that plays the most crucial part in digesting their food. When your cats smells food, this triggers its brain to prepare the body for digestion. The olfactory center in the brain sends a message to slow down metabolism so the body can focus on digesting food. Saliva and digestive juices start to flow while blood flow and waste disposal slow. This is a perfect arrangement for digesting food efficiently, but it is not the state you want your cat to be in twenty four hours a day.

By leaving the food out, your cat is smelling it all day and your cat’s body stays in constant preparation for digesting food. In this state of a slower metabolism, several health issues can arise, dandruff or obesity. Worse, the trigger mechanism in the brain that starts the digestive process can wear out and fail to respond, resulting in an under supply of blood to all the organs but the stomach. This can lead to faster aging.

Maybe your cat is too skinny and has a poor appetite. The answer is not to leave more food out, more often, but just the opposite, remove all the food after a short while to give the trigger response a chance to rest.
Try feeding twice a day, and pick up the food after your cat eats. If your cat is a slow eater, than you can leave it for about a half hour to forty five minutes. Then take it away and wash everything, so that no smell remains.

It may surprise you but leaving food available all day is a primary cause of the finicky eater syndrome. You may find your cat is more interested in eating when its presented rather than left out. By the way, a cat must eat every day, to stay healthy, even if it is overweight and on a diet.

So, feed feeding is something we humans came up with. Think about it. If your cat was hunting for food outside, and caught a mouse, the mouse is not kept around all day, to be nibbled on bit by bit.
Cats in the wild that hunt, catch and kill their prey, gorge on it and then may not eat for days. This fast helps the cats organs, the intestines, kidneys, lungs and skin get a good cleaning. When we don’t provide a fasting period for our house cats, their body has little time to process the food and accomplish necessary waste disposal. By feeding twice a day and removing the food between meals gives your cat the fast that mother nature intended.

Try this with your kitty and let me know how it goes.