Dog & Cat Cat Calorie Calculator
How many calories should your cat actually eat to lose weight safely? This calculator uses the same ideal-weight math as the Dog & Cat Nutrition Coach app, including the built-in safety floor that protects against feline hepatic lipidosis (fatty liver disease) during a diet.
Enter your cat's numbers
How this number was calculated
Why cats need different math from dogs
Fatty liver risk is real and fast
If a cat's calorie intake drops too far, too fast, the body can mobilize fat faster than the liver can process it, triggering hepatic lipidosis — a life-threatening condition that can develop within days. This is specific to cats; dogs are not at meaningful risk from a similarly paced diet.
Cats are dosed on ideal weight, flat rate
Because of that risk, feline weight-loss targets in AAHA/WSAVA-style guidance are set as a fixed rate against the cat's ideal body weight — not scaled up or down by activity level or neuter status the way a dog's is — and are never pushed below a hard floor.
Dogs scale with activity
A dog's weight-loss target is calculated from its current weight and scaled by how active it is and whether it's intact, because dogs tolerate a faster, more aggressive deficit than cats do. See the dog calorie calculator.
Weigh-ins should drive changes, not guesswork
This page gives a starting point. Dog & Cat Nutrition Coach adjusts your cat's actual daily target week to week from logged intake and real weigh-in trends, rather than leaving it fixed at day one's estimate.
Method: Resting Energy Requirement (RER) = 70 × (body weight in kg)0.75, following AAHA and WSAVA feline/canine nutritional assessment guidance. Ideal weight is estimated from body condition score (each point above 5 subtracts about 10% for a cat). This is the same calculation used inside the Dog & Cat Nutrition Coach app.
Want to see the arithmetic by hand? How much to feed a dog or cat, step by step →