u/CommercialPangolin

I adopted my cat as a kitten 4 years ago and I’ve always wanted a second kitten in the home. My cat did have a few siblings but, due to my living situation at the time, I wasn’t able to adopt a pair back then.

I feel like I’m now ready to adopt, but I live with a roommate who didn’t seem too enthused with the idea when I brought it up. Her reasoning was that she gets stressed when I’m out of town and she has to take care of my cat and can’t imagine having to do it for two cats. She’s not used to living with an animal and left her window open once and my cat did escape for 20 minutes, so now when she can’t find the cat she gets scared even though Luna is just chilling in my room or something.

The first time she watched Luna, I didn’t ask her but she offered to for 5 days while I was out of town. Then she last minute said she was busy and couldn’t be home to feed dinner for 2 of those days. This was frustrating for me trying to coordinate alternative care with 2 hours notice while I was traveling with bad cell service and so I’ve only asked her to watch Luna one other weekend when I really couldn’t find anyone else to stop by. That time I only asked her to scoop the litter and check on the auto feeder and fountain since I couldn’t rely on her to feed dinner on time.

I understand that she’s not used to having cats around, but she also spends 6 days a week at her boyfriend’s place and usually only returns on Sunday to chill and do laundry. We also live in a 2 bed/2 bath and have our own separate spaces. So I feel like this doesn’t really impact her much and she’s my last resort for cat care anyway. Would I be in the wrong if I adopted another cat?

EDIT: She doesn’t mind the presence of another cat in the home or cat related things in the living room, she actually loves hanging out with my current cat and is always happy to see her. She is not stressed out in her own home, her only issue is with taking care of the cats when I’m out of town, which she will NOT be asked to do. She also is okay with other friends or a Rover sitter entering the home to check in, which is what I have done in the past.

I’m a 5’3” female and have gone from 145 in January to 136 in May of this year by eating at a slight deficit and strength training 2-3x a week. From May-July I pretty much maintained my weight without tracking consistently since I wanted to enjoy summer (I live in the PNW so the sun is a precious resource) and had a few trips planned as well.

To figure out my deficit, I use MFP to track calories and connect it to an app called Zolt, which averages my weight weekly and updates maintenance calories based on rate of weight loss. For the last 4 weeks, I’ve been back on my regular routine but am not seeing the scale go down like I used to, which is making it hard to figure out what my maintenance is at my current weight. I eat in a 400-500 cal deficit on weekdays and then maintenance or slightly above on weekends to hopefully average out to a loss of .5 lb/week. But my weight jumps up so high from eating out/having a couple drinks during the weekend that I’m getting back to the same weight every Friday morning and then gaining 2 pounds of water weight again. This makes it seem like I’m eating at maintenance, but my maintenance can’t be 1400 calories right? Especially since I’ve been getting >10k steps this past month and hiking 6+ miles some weekends.

Am I actually not losing and are my maintenance calories really that low??