For your body
Staying fit should be fun, inexpensive, and non-intimidating. Choose workouts to fit your lifestyle, whether it's biking, martial arts, Pilates, swimming, walking, or yoga.

Learn to control cravings. Refrain from "yo-yo" dieting. Dine out responsibly. Time your meals. Avoid emotional eating. And, as a special note to our editor: no, donut holes are not negative calories just because they're pulled out of the donut. Eat a lot and you'll still gain wait.

Don't try to go it alone. Seek expert advice. Rely on the knowledge and expertise of medical professionals, nutritionists, and fitness trainers to help you along the way. Consider joining a support group with others who share your goal of weight loss.

For your mailbox
Clean up your mailbox. As shown in Figure B, you can manage the size of your mailbox to improve the overall performance of Microsoft Outlook. On the Tools menu, click Mailbox Cleanup.

FIGURE B

You can use as a tool to manage the size of your Microsoft Outlook mailbox. Click picture for a larger image.

Within this window you can:

• View the total size of your mailbox and the individual folders within it.
• Find items older than a certain date.
• Find items that are larger than a certain KB size.
• Archive items using AutoArchive.
• View the size of your Deleted Items folder.
• Empty your Deleted Items folder.
• View the size of your Conflicts folder.
• Delete your Conflicts folder.

Minimize downloads. You can prevent large messages from downloading to your Inbox from your email server. Here are some steps that can make this pretty easy:

• On the Tools menu, point to Send/Receive, point to Send/Receive Settings, and then click Define Send/Receive Groups.
• From the list, click the group that includes the account you want, and then click Edit.
• Under Accounts, click the account you want.
• From the list, select the folder you want to specify limits for.
• Select the Inbox check box.
• Select the Download only headers for items larger than x KB check box, and then enter a number in the box.

Reduce data file size. A data file is a Personal Folders file (.pst). You can delete items from a .pst, but the size of the file will not change unless you compact the file. Here's how:

• From the File menu, click Data File Management.
• Click the data file that you want to compact, and then click Settings.
• Click Compact Now.

See, the Microsoft Outlook mailbox isn't so different from the human body after all, is it? They each have various ways, tools, and methods to use in order to "trim down." Hopefully you will benefit from this article and take a light-hearted approach to mailbox management. Good luck!

Kathy Evans-Davis is a senior technical writer in the information technology industry in the greater metropolitan Washington, DC-Baltimore, MD area and owner of QuantumScribe Freelance Writing at http://www.quantumscribe.com. Reach Kathy by email at kathy@quantumscribe.com.