Many people give up things in the New Year to keep a resolution. This year I’ll be making one of the most cliché’ resolutions there are: to lose a bit of weight.

But it’s not something I haven’t tackled before. A few years back, lost 83 pounds in about a year-and-a-half. I’ve yo-yoed back to somewhere in between that now and I remember the struggle to get thin quite well. So the few pounds I’m trying to shed this year shouldn’t be that difficult, except that I’m five years older and my metabolism has slowed to a snail’s pace.

You may be thinking, “How in the world did he lose such an amount of weight?”

Well, first, I had to gain it. When my wife and I were first married and our son was about a year old, I would eat an entire plate full of food for dinner and, often, go back for seconds. Lunch was takeout and I never ate breakfast. Back then I thought my teenaged metabolism would still kick in the middle of eating half a large pizza. I was wrong.

But losing it required three things. Discipline, diet and exercise. The first 25 or so pounds seemed to melt off when I cut out fast food and sodas, except on certain occasions when my family would be traveling and I would have no choice but to enjoy a cheeseburger, fries and a Coke.

After losing the first few pounds I began exercising regularly and got up to 300 sit-ups a day, at minimum. I alternated other exercises to keep things in balance and I didn’t exercise on weekends. So for those of you wanting to shed a few pounds I say go for it. It’s hard work and you become a different person while you’re losing weight, but it pays off and you will be healthier in the long run.

Besides a few pounds, another thing I’ll be losing this year will be cable television. We’ve had cable at our house for the past two months and by this time next week my old companion will be gone.

When I was growing up, my mom, a schoolteacher, used to get cable on a trial basis ever now and again. Sometimes we would keep it for a season or two and then, inevitably the money for cable would have to be cut from the family budget. The same thing has happened at my house recently. When they laid fiber optic lines near our home and gave us the choice to upgrade our phone and Internet services at no charge, a cable package was included on a trial basis.

I must admit that I don’t have much time for television now that I’m a father, save sporting events, which seem to never be on broadcast TV. I, like many others in the Nintendo Generation, can watch my favorite shows at my leisure on the Internet. Some people don’t care for online TV, but I don’t mind it.

But cable TV was always a companion of mine growing up. I sometimes wonder how many thousands of hours I logged rotting my brain on the couch flipping aimlessly between shows run ad-nauseam, 24-hours a day. When I was growing up I also noticed that no matter what time you turned on the TV, you could always find either Will Smith or WWII documentaries on. There’s no real point to that observation, just something I noticed.

Since we’re going to be welcoming our second son into the world in a few weeks, I, like my mom, will have to use the money to keep cable beaming into our living room for something else, and say goodbye to my old friend. But like many old friends, goodbye isn’t so bad. It’s just something you say in between the times you meet. See you again soon cable, probably next fall for college football season.