Last Updated on May 1, 2026 by admin
When Patches arrived at Richmond Animal Care and Control on April 4, 2023, he couldn’t sit up to eat his own food. He had to lie on his side and lap. He couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs. He couldn’t fit on a normal cat scale. He weighed 42 pounds — about the size of a Labrador puppy.
Three years later, he just weighed in at 18.48 pounds.
Patches is a white-and-gray domestic shorthair who landed at the Virginia shelter when his original owners surrendered him because they could no longer care for him. The staff at Richmond Animal Care and Control said he was the largest cat they had ever taken in.
They posted one photo to Facebook on April 19, 2023. He had a home by lunchtime.
Out of dozens of applications — from people in California, Maine, all over the country — RACC picked Kay Ford, a Richmond retiree who was willing to commit to a vet-supervised weight-loss plan. She drove him home that day and started keeping a Facebook diary of every pound. She now has 54,000 followers watching it.
Here is what three years on a strict diet looks like, told in the small things Patches can finally do.
He can sit up to eat from his food bowl.
He can walk up the stairs without stopping halfway.
He can fit on his own personal scale, which he could not do for the first year.
He once broke a pantry door. Ford named that version of him “Steamroller” and posted the photo of the cracked frame to Facebook with a single caption about how he had many goals. You can see the latest milestone in WTVR’s coverage of his three-year adoption anniversary.
Last October, the Kelly Clarkson Show flew Ford out to talk about him. Ford said she had absolutely no idea it was happening — Clarkson surprised her on air with a montage of every Patches before-and-after photo since 2023.
He is currently about 2.5 pounds away from his second goal: 16 pounds.
That number is not arbitrary. The Cornell Feline Health Center places a healthy adult domestic shorthair somewhere between 8 and 12 pounds, with bigger frames a touch higher. Sixteen would put Patches at “large but normal.” It would mean his joints, his liver, his heart, and his ability to groom his own back all have a real future.
Ford’s posts almost never use the word “fat.” She does not shame him. She does not joke about him. She writes things like “He found his hips today” and “He climbed up onto the bed by himself for the first time” and “We are so proud of him.”
One post, after a particularly slow weigh-in, said he was no longer relegated to the floor — he got to be a regular cat.
Patches is seven years old now. He gets one weighed meal twice a day, supervised playtime, and a heated bed. The pantry door has been reinforced.
His Facebook page still updates almost every week. The comments are mostly older women with names like Doreen and Janet, calling him a good boy and posting pictures of their own cats sitting next to dinner plates.
The internet calls him chonky. Ford calls him liberated.
Tell us in the comments — what is the heaviest your cat has ever weighed? 🐱