Because I know that I can't keep my New Year's resolutions, I'm not making any for myself this year.

But I am making one for Glory, the black and white springer spaniel who lives at my house. She's going to lose weight in 2009.

Like many folks, I find it impossible to stick to my resolutions for more than a few weeks. I think it's because we make our resolutions too difficult. We resolve to do things we know we have no intention of actually doing

My resolutions are always like this. I'll resolve to eat healthier or to lose weight or to stop making fun of Georgia Tech fans. And by the middle of January, I've broken them all.

We should make easier resolutions. A few years ago, for instance, I resolved to not eat mushrooms in the coming year. I hate mushrooms. Mushrooms are fungus, and, if it's just the same to you, I don't want fungus anywhere near anything that I'm about to eat. So it was easy to keep that resolution.

Glory is a different story. She's going to need a little tough love if my resolution for her is to stick.

A couple of months ago, Glory had major surgery to remove several tumors, one of which was the size of a baseball. After a few anxious days awaiting the pathology report, we were delighted to find that the tumors were nothing more than benign fatty tissue.

These fatty tumors, it turns out, are fairly common in older dogs, especially obese female dogs.

Glory is not obese. But she is slightly overweight. I don't know why. But she is. While I was trying to lose weight, she and I were walking a couple of miles each day. Several times a week, I'd throw a tennis ball for her to chase. And she occasionally went swimming in Lake Lanier.

She was getting what I thought was plenty of exercise. Yet during this time, I lost 35 pounds. She gained 8.

So Doc, Glory's personal veterinarian, put her on a special diet.

You'd think putting a dog on a diet would be an easy thing. You've obviously never met Glory.

A couple of days after her surgery, I filled her bowl with the prescribed amount of the diet food. Glory walked over, took a sniff and looked up at me as if to say, "What kind of game are you playing here, Joke Boy?"

Two nights later, the bowl was still untouched.

"Don't worry," Doc assured me. "She won't starve herself. When she gets hungry enough, she'll eat."

He said I could try mixing the diet food with some of her old food, then gradually, over a few weeks, reduce the amount of the old food until nothing but the diet food was left. Essentially, I'd be tricking her into eating it.

Didn't work.

The first night I tried this, I heard her in the kitchen crunching away on her food. I was relieved. Then I walked back into the kitchen.

What the little varmint had done was take a mouthful of the food from the bowl and drop it on the kitchen floor. Then she's pick out the old food, which she liked, and leave the diet food, which she didn't like. My floor was covered with diet food.

We've come to something of an understanding. I'm still feeding her the diet dog food, mixed with a just a bit of the old food. She's eating it, begrudgingly, because she's realized she's not getting anything else, though I still pick up a few pieces of the uneaten diet food.

She's even eating lowcalorie dog treats. She actually likes the ones that are apple flavored.

But every chance she gets, she begs food from anyone she can find that has some.

"I don't think you feed this dog," my friend, David, said after Glory attempted to snatch a piece of chicken off his plate while we were watching bowl games last week.

This diet is only a few weeks old, and the New Year's resolution is only a few days old. Hopefully, Glory will come around and she'll lose the weight she needs to lose.

If not, she may have to adopt the same opinion I have about making resolutions.

I wonder how she feels about mushrooms.

Mitch Clarke is executive editor of The Times in Gainesville, Ga. He can be reached at mclarke@ gainesvilletimes. com.