Last Updated on April 14, 2026 by admin
When Patches arrived at Richmond Animal Care and Control in April 2023, the scale read 42 pounds. For context, that’s heavier than an average adult Beagle. The white-and-gray Domestic Shorthair couldn’t climb stairs, couldn’t jump onto furniture, and moved across the shelter floor like a throw pillow that had gained sentience and given up.
His previous owners had surrendered him because they could no longer provide care. Kay Ford of Mechanicsville, Virginia, saw his photo and applied to adopt him that same day.
She didn’t have a weight-loss plan yet. She just knew she wasn’t leaving a 42-pound cat in a cage.
The Steamroller Era
Patches’ vet built a weekly schedule: a strict daily calorie count, a structured meal plan, and regular weigh-ins that Ford tracked like a personal trainer logging reps. Patches, for his part, had other priorities. He headbutted the pantry door so many times he ripped it clean off its hinges. Ford started calling him the Steamroller.
Five months in, he’d dropped to 32 pounds — and climbed stairs on his own for the first time. Ford cried on camera. By April 2024, he hit 25 pounds. By late July, he cracked 20. And by October 2025, Patches weighed 18.94 pounds — less than half what he’d started at.
Gone: 24 pounds. Still intact: every ounce of attitude.
54,000 People and a Talk Show
Ford documented the whole journey on Patches’ Journey, a Facebook page that now has more than 54,000 followers. Strangers sent messages on weigh-in days. Comments sections turned into support groups for anyone who’d ever put a cat on a diet and watched it stare at them like they’d committed a war crime.
In October 2025, the Kelly Clarkson Show brought Ford on as a surprise guest. Clarkson gushed over the transformation. The show’s partner Pilot handed Ford a $1,000 check — and Ford turned around and donated every dollar to Purring Hearts VA, an independent foster-based cat rescue in Richmond.
She had “absolutely zero idea” the surprise was coming.
Then Came March
On March 22, 2026, Patches didn’t eat his lunch.
Ford knew immediately. In three years of carrying him to the vet, logging every gram of food, and cheering every lost ounce, she had never once heard Patches hiss. That day, he hissed at everybody.
The vet suspects a back injury or previously undiagnosed arthritis — not uncommon in cats who spent years carrying extreme weight. Patches is now on anti-inflammatory medication and gabapentin for the pain. Ford has set him up in a bedroom with a ramp to the bed, where he sleeps while his body heals.
He’s 18.48 pounds now. Two and a half pounds from his goal of 16.
Still the Steamroller
Patches went from a cat who couldn’t cross a room without wheezing to a cat who ripped a door off its frame, made 54,000 strangers care about his Tuesday weigh-ins, and landed on national television. He lost more weight than most people’s entire cat weighs.
A sore back isn’t going to be the thing that stops him.
Has your cat ever scared you with a sudden change in behavior? Tell us what happened in the comments. 🐱