DIETING LAWS THAT WORK 100% OF THE TIME (PART II) (This is the second of a multiple-part series in the monthly Kneson Software newsletter. Read part I by clicking here.) This article contains techniques that you should use in conjunction with any diet. This is not a diet program - it is a set of universal principles that must be followed for a diet to work.

Don't Eat Food You Don't Make. Stop eating in restaurants. Eat only food that you make from raw ingredients in your own kitchen. When I was a teenager, I worked in many restaurants. Behind every single one of them was a big, stinky barrel with grease in it. I don't know about you, but my kitchen produces no such substance. I worked in so many different restaurants by the time I was out of my teenage years that I realized the ingredients that used by restaurants are low quality — often worse quality than "generic" products you would find in a grocery store. This food has the highest calorie and fat content— and you are not able to ask for the Nutrition Facts to monitor what you are actually eating.

Also consider this — cooks and chefs spend their entire careers creating recipes that have little to do with healthiness and everything to do with taste in order to get your business. In other words, a chef is not paid to keep you alive longer, they are paid to get you to eat their food often, regardless of how bad it may be for you. Fast food restaurants are the worst at this. The food they sell is — in my humble opinion - NOT FOOD. It is what I jokingly call “tree-bark” or “river-bottom-clay” ... addictive substance made to taste so good that you will buy it over and over. Fast food chains have spent money and effort to devise food that tastes so good that it can actually make you think about it even when you are not hungry. Yet there is strong evidence that it can contribute not only to making you fat, but to serious medical conditions that can place your very life in danger.

Take Your Food With You. Eating in restaurants will always stop you from losing weight and being healthy. So - how do you keep from eating in restaurants? The first thing you must do is to carry all of your food with you every single day. Too difficult? Try it, then try to establish a habit of it. It is much easier than you might think. I carry a soft-sided attache case and Rubermaid^® or Tupperware^® containers of food that can be cooked in a microwave or ready-to-eat. If you are on a diet, study it to find ways of making it "portable."

Sticking with this habit is the key. This is why you will sometimes hear some health expert say that there really is no such thing as a diet - losing weight and eating healthy is a lifestyle. You may have heard this and wondered what it meant. You will notice if you decide to take all of your food with you that portions of your daily life will be different, especially activities centered around the serving or consumption of food. Just remember that the lifestyle is not that difficult and will give you huge rewards in how you look, how you feel and your chances for a longer, healthier life. In this way, the word “diet” is really not descriptive enough. This activity is a lifestyle change in a very positive way.

I spend about an hour or so every night preparing food. Some people think this is a waste of time, but it actually makes more time during the next day, and saves money. I can skip the hustle, bustle and expense of the restaurant rush every day, and relax because I have all my food with me. Sure, there are times when this behavior may be a little “anti-social” because eating what others eat in restaurants is not an option, but if you get creative you can find ways to join in socially without making yourself obvious.

Never Be In A Restaurant or Grocery Store Hungry. The activity of dieting doesn't have to center around willpower for a better portion of the time you are awake. Effective dieting occurs during the 30-60 minutes when you are actually in the grocery store. As stated in Part I of this series in our last newsletter, you must "act like a surgeon" in the grocery store extracting and purchasing only items that is on your diet and refraining from purchasing anything else. This task will only be made more difficult if you are hungry at the time. It is almost impossible if you are hungry while with friends or co-workers in a restaurant. Think ahead if you are going to be in locations that serve food and try to have eaten what is on your diet just before.

Get Out Of Your Rut You have a goal - career or otherwise - you have a plan to reach the goal, and you have the desire. So why aren’t you making progress as fast as you want? Here are some tips that might help:

• Prioritize. Review your plan and see what needs to be done first to reach your objectives. Make the first step an easy one. Accomplish a short-term goal and then reward yourself for getting started. Goals and tasks - especially difficult ones - always seem much harder than they actually are until you get started. Remember: Well begun is half done!
  
  
• Check your attitude. You either think you can or you think you can’t. Either way - you're right! If you can conceive it (develop a goal) and you can believe it (have faith that you can get it done) you can achieve it. It’s time to change the irrational or faulty thinking that keeps you rooted in indecision.
  
  
• Leave the past behind. You have to be willing to take some risks. Don’t hold back because of past mistakes or failures. Set your mind to the thrill of succeeding rather than the fear of failing.
  
  
• Set realistic expectations. By all means, set high standards. But if the standards are so high that they freeze you into inaction, rethink your goals. Try setting shorter term goals that contribute to the main goal. As you accomplish each one, set higher ones.
  
  
• Enough with the excuses. Ignore the voices that hold you back from accomplishing what you truly want to accomplish in your life. Those voices only occur in your mind when you are not actually working on your goal. For example: have you ever been doing some task related to a goal and experienced the voices in your head telling you that you can't succeed at what you are doing? Just start working and doubt will disappear.
  
  
• Focus. When you were a child, did you ever use a magnifying glass and the sun to try to burn something? By positioning the magnifying glass so the rays of the sun are focused on a piece of paper for example, eventually it will start to burn. What if you were to take the magnifying glass away from time to time then put it back on the paper. How much longer would the paper take to burn? Such it is with the way many of us conduct our day-to-day lives. We work a little on this and a little on that - rarely sticking with just one task until it is complete.

Track Real Time Can Help
One of the biggest challenges all of us face today is the need to focus on what is really important. Television, cell phones, your children, e-mail and instant messaging, unforeseen emergencies, angry bosses or customers and all the daily tasks we must do in our lives distract us from our most important tasks like never before. Day planners and planning software such as Microsoft Outlook™ do a great job at planning our days to accomplish our goals, but what will keep you focused as you move through your day?

As mentioned in our last newsletter, Kneson Software will be releasing Track Real Time (formerly the Time Registration System) - a program that continuously keeps you focused on your most important tasks in real time. You simply input the various projects you are working on and add all the activities you do during the day regardless of project, then tell the system the time interval you want it to popup and ask you what you are doing. This popup window takes a 'From' and 'To' time, asks for the project and task you have been working on during the last interval, and can be immediately closed if you don't want to input anything right then. You can read more about Track Real Time by clicking here.

Imagener Unlimited Release Status We know that everyone that has ordered Imagener Unlimited is eagerly awaiting its release.

The release date, moved to mid-September has experienced a slight further delay. It is in late beta testing right now. Current pre-release customers that have purchased Imagener Unlimited can download and use this beta copy immediately by simply clicking on their original order link and re-installing. PLEASE USE CAUTION — installing this version will over-write your current version of Imagener. All of the interpolation methods will be available to you as before (Kneson, Kneson Progressive, and Kneson Progressive++ with the addition of the Kneson Unlimited enlargement method in beta test form. The other Kneson enlargement methods function exactly as before.

Upgrade customers do not have access to this beta. If you have purcased an upgrade (see our upgrade page)and would like a copy of this BETA version, please write to us at support@kneson.com or call us toll free at 877-291-8583 and leave us a message with your order number OR the exact e-mail address you used when you originally placed your order.

We have developed this beta release such that you will not have to re-activate your license and you do not have to uninstall the copy of Imagener that is on your computer now. Just run the install program and it will overwrite the current copy of Imagener Professional.

Being in active development means:

• Bugs are being fixed on daily basis
• Improvements are being made on daily basis
• Things that worked in the last version might work differently or be broken in this one

If a particular image is causing problems, please email the image to (support@kneson.com) or upload (ftp://ftp.kneson.com/upload/) the image and email us with information about the enlargement performed

New versions of this BETA are available every 5-10 days. Again, to obtain the next BETA just download it with the same download link you have been provided and install it over the existing version (do not uninstall the current version).

As you may or may not know, Imagener Unlimited is an entirely new version of Imagener - new in the sense that it enlarges images in a completely different way than Imagener Enhanced and Imagener Professional. The underlying technology used to create Imagener Unlimited is a ground-breaking method of image enlargement that took over four years and $2.5 million of technical development to create. Read more about Imagener Unlimited's technical aspects or features.

The good news for those that have not pre-ordered Imagener Unlimited is that there are still a few days left to take advantage of the 85% discounted level for both new orders and upgrades. Click here to upgrade your version of Imagener now.

Tell Us What You Want Kneson Software is planning the next version of the Imagener product line, and we want your opinion! We have a number of proposed additions that you can vote on at the Kneson Software Forum:

Kneson Software development is in the process of deciding what features to add to Imagener, so we decided to ask our customers and website visitors. Choices are:

• Unlimited Enlargment (due August 2004)
• Batch processing (via GUI and Command Line)
• Multiple Page Printing (split large images to print on multiple pages)
• Maintaining defaults in input field
• Other (write us at http://www.kneson.com/Request)

NOTE: FOR THE TIME BEING - ALL IMAGENER UPGRADES ARE FREE TO OUR CURRENT CUSTOMERS. So -- let us know what new features you would like to see in the next version. Click here to vote.