Q: My cat Mia is a rescue.  We found her at about 9 months old…she was thin and starving. Mia now weighs in at 17lbs. at 3 years old.  My question is why is she so fat?  I used to free feed, but she would eat everything in her bowl and still want more. Now I feed her two-thirds of a cup per day and she acts like I'm starving her. How do I go about putting her on a diet?

A:  I have a Simoli that we also recently rescued from a third world country.  Thank you for rescuing her.  This issue is very hard to deal with with cats and almost impossible if you have several cats.  The only way to help her lose weight is to restrict food and keep up activity levels.  Weigh her carefully and every two weeks adjust her food to correspond with results.  So you will want to subtract a little more if she is not losing and add a little if she is losing too much.  I would also try to keep her as active as you are able.  I know that does not help much, but unfortunately there are no magic bullets for this issue.