Can you imagine staying over someone else's house out in the desert, no place to dash out to, and your host is only feeding you once per day? Feeding a cat or a dog once per day is rudeness personified. Ee concept of two or three or ten times per day on any set schedule should be enough to cause any animal to be neurotic. As it stands now, when you do feed them, they gobble their food down, enjoying neither most of the taste, nor most of the nutritional benefits which are wasted through inadequate digestion. What could you be thinking?
I have to laugh at people who say, "Oh, my pet won't eat any other brand, because...." These people crack me up. The rare time that one of my animals has shown reluctance to eat a particular food, the possibility of the food being bad is first priority, so the food is tossed, and no other food is issued. Twelve or so hours later, I offer a fresh batch. It gets gobbled every time, and you get licks of appreciation and purring or the canine equivalent. The only exception to this, and it's happened just once, a cat did NOT eat the offered food. At that point, I threw the whole box away, because I realized there was something wrong with the food in the box. That can happen; you need to understand that dog and cat food, as is almost ALL pet food, made of really horrible ingredients, the worst and most discarded parts of whatever animal leftovers are being used.
Please do not think that your cat's so-called tuna or other fish products are related to the chunks of fish you get in food sold for human consumption. Those tiny little cans of what is poorly referred to as gourmet cat food is, in fact, mostly garbage I wouldn't feed to an anyone I DIDN'T like... including animals in my care.
We all get hungry every few hours. Animals do, too. Whether dog or cat, gerbil or rabbit (both of which are rodents, in case you didn't know, animals that are fed a couple of times per day eat less and live longer. Benjamin Franklin was not referring to humans only when he correctly posited that the less you eat, the longer you live. Science has borne this out a thousandfold, and your own knowledge of how people eat their way into strokes and heart attacks serves only to reinforce the axiom's power of truth.
From dim sum and Mallomars to french fries and pasta, those of us who know better eat dozens and scores of different foods, more than you, in all likelihood, and don't gain weight. You see, we chew our food, and we eat less of it. Sure, I've blended an entire quart of Rocky Road ice cream with milk or Bailey's Irish Cream (thanks to the preternaturally beautiful Marilyn Barrett); those excesses are barely once a year. In the meantime, when we eat a half or a third of what we'd normally call a portion of fried these or those, or baked such and such, we extend our lives and quality of life by no small measure.
LIKE IT OR NOT DEPARTMENT:
When you raise the temperature of food you introduce into the human body these nasty little things called -- take your pick of the name you like best -- free radicals or scavengers or oxidants. Whichever of this trio of words appeals most to you, tolerate no misunderstanding in your own mind: free radicals very literally eat and decay your flesh, aging it. Scavengers literally eat and decay your flesh. Oxidants, which create rust on metal, eat and decay your flesh. In all cases, it eats the flesh from the inside out. No doctor or scientist will dispute this statement. This process is the basis of aging.
Because it applies to animals as well as humans, you might just want to give this a bit of consideration before deciding whether or not you can afford to trade one third of the garbage you eat for more green and red vegetables and water. Even my latest cat has shown he loves water. He has had milk only twice since I got him at maybe three weeks of age. He drinks water, and I bet he's healthier than you are.
Learn more. Live more. A few better decisions and you get to enjoy the benefits of living stronger longer. Go for it.