I have three cats and three cat feeders. The feeders are spread through the house so there is a distance between them. One sits up high out of the fat cat’s reach. The feeders are programmed to dish out cat chow at almost exactly same time (one feeder is earlier by a couple of seconds). So when the feeders go off, the dominant male runs to the first feeder to go off, the skinny cat eats her food by jumping up to the feeder on the special table, and the fat cat rolls to her feeder which dishes out her mega bucks diet food. Problem solved! No microchips. Cats complained at first but got used to times feedings.
@3girls3cats if it is at all affordable to you, I highly recommend the I -131 treatment for your hyperthyroid cat. It was by far the least onerous of all the proposed treatments. Our cat was in the hospital for 3 weeks, and then his poop was no longer radioactive. It completely cured him.
For cat lovers: time lapse from kitten to cat. Cute!!
https://twistedsifter.com/videos/morphing-timelapse-from-kitten-to-adult/
@BunsenBurner thank you so much for that article. I laughed so hard, the big cat currently stretched out on my lap twitched in alarm at the movement. “What is all this merriment?” he wants to know.
@Massmomm and @BunsenBurner , that treatment sounds like the way to go. I’m still giggling about managing the radioactive waste and setting up a Chernobyl-esque dacha in the basement.
It is not as bad as it sounds if you don’t have any othe issues. One of my friends simply set up a Chernobyl-esque bucket in the garage for storing waste until the cat was out of the woods. The other, unfortunately, got a job in a new city in the middle of the ordeal, and the employer wanted her there pronto, so she, her slightly radioactive cat, and a sack of cat crap traveled by car from Seattle to Chicago. 
Very interesting @3girls3cats…When my cat had I-131 treatment she was only in the hospital for 3 days. Then I was advised to keep my distance and handle her radioactive waste per the sort of routine @massmom employed. It really wasn’t bad at all. Having had another hyperthyroid cat that was not a candidate for I-131 I can tell you that it is a far better option than the twice daily medication schedule we lived with for many years… The radiated cat was cured while the medicated one was just managed and was never as healthy as her cured sister.
Ok friends, I need more advice. The vet just emailed me to tell me that hyperthyroidism is not the issue after all. Everything came back normal, but for an elevated basophil count. This, I learned, is a type of white blood cell, and it’s rarely elevated and often not even present in cats and dogs. It can signal an allergy or, she says, rarely, cancer. (I asked whether the eosinophil count was also high because when these two types of white blood cells are both elevated it generally signals an allergy of some type, or a parasite.) The vet wants her to try a prescription hypoallergenic food to see if that helps her to gain weight and then wants to check her CBC in 2 weeks. Does this sound reasonable? I am trying not to panic.
IMO, sounds reasonable. Has she been tested for parasites?
She hasn’t. I asked about that as well.
I have a hyperthyroid cat and have no trouble medicating him twice a day. I got the answer to easily pilling a cat from the internet–maybe even here? I crush the pill to a powder and mix it into a little bit of soft, butter flavored margarine, which I then smear over the cat’s lips–or where lips would be if cats had lips. By instinct, cats will lick off anything around their mouths, and apparently the mix of pill and buttery flavor is quite acceptable–there’s no spitting or retching. The whole process takes two minutes (we call it buttering the cat, as in “Did you butter Boots yet?”) And it’s a lot better than surgery or a radioactive kitty. (We won’t even discuss the fact that I’m also hyperthyroid and take the same medication as my cat as I put off the prospect of my own surgery or irradiation.) I’m sure the buttering method won’t work for every feline–mine are Ragdolls and very laid back–but it’s worth a try whenever a cat is prescribed a medication in pill form.
@MommaJ that sounds like a tip worth filing away for the future. I’m pretty sure one of my two would do very well with this method. It reminds me of my first cat and hairball medicine. Oh, did he love licking that stuff from a spoon! Easiest cat to medicate.
The underweight cat is waiting for her expensive prescription food. I’m hoping she will like it. She’s pretty picky but she does seem to like the premium stuff.
I hope the new food works and that your cat likes it. My two guys are very old (19) and both in kidney failure. The vet recommended a special kidney failure canned food, but they didn’t like it and would just pick at it. I’ve decided that quality of life, rather than length of life, is what counts for my sweet guys, so I buy them the food they adore (two varieties of Friskies Cat Concoctions, particularly digusting looking stuff) and they wolf it down. I want their last days to be happy ones.
My cat often vomits. Often, it’s mostly water, with some hair mixed in for good measure.
Some time during the middle of the night I heard her gagging. I was too deep into my sleep to get up and investigate. Looking around my room this morning, I didn’t see anything.
I found it when I was leaving and stepped into my shoes.
REALLY???
Yes, shoes are often a target.
We had a cat that got nicknamed the Barfing Queen. Every time she had the urge to barf, she would run up the stairs, and send a stream of it down, hitting several steps. Always on the carpet, never on solid surfaces.
@BunsenBurner, we had the sweetest cat, the only thing he did that drove me crazy was to sit on the wood flood, lean over and hock up a hairball on the oriental carpet! Every time, without fail, the only place we would find the hariball was was on the carpet.
@BunsenBurner, @ECmotherx2, and @Nrdsb4, we also used to have very gifted and deliberate barfers, always aiming for rugs and carpets.
Our grown D kicked off her science research career with a fourth-grade science fair project investigating whether different kinds of food affected their output. The display triptych lives on in family history for its carefully lettered little bags of Iams and Friskies . . . and the very realistic Sculpey versions of little barf piles. 
How timely. As I was reading, I looked down and what did I see but a nice glob of cat vomit all over the family room rug. How do they perfect their aim?
@HarrietMWelsch that is hilarious and also very creative!
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-47473772
The cat man of Aleppo 
One of my favorite strips of Breaking Cat News (The woman is pregnant.): http://www.breakingcatnews.com/comic/the-woman-has-a-hairball/
FWIW: The three cats are Elvis, Puck and Lupin and they exist in real life. The comic chronicles life with the three.
<3 The cat man. Thanks, @BunsenBurner.