This is a follow-up to a previous post on treating Cat’s cancer through nutritional improvements.
Her holistic veterinarian referred me to a website called Balance.it where you can formulate free, custom-balanced recipes by selecting preferred ingredients. Since Cat’s recipes need to be tailored for cancer, I needed the vet’s approval to unlock this specialty feature (at no additional cost).
Perhaps naive: I hadn’t realized homemade diets could be so vitamin-deficient, but Balance.it offers a supplement powder to add to homemade food to…well…balance it. (It’s pricey, though: ~$80 for a 600g pack that goes quickly, so if you know a good but more affordable alternative, drop me a note.) The website warns of an odor, but I haven’t noticed it, and neither has Cat because she still scarfs down her fancy feasts of grass-fed beef, free-range chicken & eggs, organic veggies, beef organs, wild rice, and coconut oil.
She seriously eats better than we ever have.
I batch-cook everything separately in a Ninja Foodi XL using the pressure cooker option — protein for 5 minutes and veggies for 3 — taking care not to overcook, since that can create carcinogens. I then mix the different lots of cooked food together (in a big ole cauldron of sorts) to make about a week and a half of food at once. At meal time, I also add a teaspoon of Icelandic Fish Oil for dogs (<< this one has the lowest stink-factor of all I’ve tried so far).
Since she’s underweight and at risk for bloat, I feed her three small meals a day.
TBH, making her food is time-consuming as hell, but it’s something I can control, which is good when so much feels out of my hands. And admittedly, hacking away at organ meat like a scene straight out of the movie American Psycho is strangely cathartic. …Oh well. Whatever helps you cope, right?! 🤷♀️
UPDATE: After months of trying to sustain the meal-making, I realized I couldn’t keep up, so I am now supplementing the homemade food with a human-grade dog food (called Sundays). More on our quest to find a high-quality kibble in this article: The Reality of Cooking for an 80lb Dog.
