My cat will eat until she throws up or until she gets really fat if I just leave food in her bowl all the time. So I feed her at regularly scheduled times, and she starts meowing and begging 1 hr to 1.5 hrs ahead of her feeding time. Some solutions I've used to prevent her from waking me up were, #1) I don't feed her until an hour after I normally get up so the meowing usually starts right around the time I want to get up anyway and acts as a back-up alarm clock, #2) At one point I used to keep a spray bottle of water next to my bed, so if she woke me up I would spray her, and that discouraged her #3) I give her one feeding late at night so she won't be so hungry first thing in the morning.

Also if the pesky meowing gets really bad I sometimes squirt water at her with a spray bottle (even after I'm awake), which she hates and which will shut her down for a good 15 mins or so, or an idea I read on (I think) another blog was good - putting her inside a pillowcase for a little while or throwing a blanket on top of her. This distracts her and becomes a game, because it takes a while for her to find her way out, so it stops her from thinking about food for a few minutes. Finally, I also did find that putting out a wheatgrass plant for her to chomp on at her leisure did seem to help take the edge off her hunger a bit. The problem was I can't keep those darn plants alive so I had to keep buying new ones. Any tips on what to do with wheatgrass? They come without dirt in the box - are you supposed to plant them? I never could understand the logic there but then I don't have much of a green thumb.