Do you think of boundaries as ways to keep something or someone out in hope to maintain your work life balance and protect your time, energy, and resources? What do healthy boundaries look like, and how can you know where and how to set them? Let's take a big breath and take another look at this business of setting boundaries.

Setting healthy boundaries is essential for a healthy work life balance. That sounds true, but what does it mean? What do healthy boundaries look like, and how can you know where and how to set them?

I notice a tendency among small business owners and free agents to think of boundaries as ways to keep something or someone out, as if they could achieve work life balance in this way. This emphasizes protection of their time, energy, and resources. This kind of boundary is a line in the sand. When a customer, colleague, or vendor crosses the line, an alarm goes off, signaling the business owner to say "No."

In an ideal world you'd be able to eat all you wanted, do as little exercise as you felt like and move around just by flicking a switch.

And if you chose to sit in front of the TV all day stuffing yourself with cakes and ice creams, it wouldn't make the slightest difference to the way you looked or how you felt.

In an ideal world, you wouldn't have to worry about your lifestyle. You'd look and feel great all the time.

Meanwhile, in the real world, huge numbers of adults and children are obese or overweight. According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Sciences, heart disease kills nearly one million people every year.

Jim Oneill

Ok, so your one of those people who just has the worst kind of schedule known to mankind. You get up at 5am so you can get to the office by 7am to start your day. You have to go to a parent-teachers meeting at your kid's school right after work, then you have to take your kid to soccer practice after that. You seem to have days like this almost all the time. You never seem to have much time for yourself between all of the things you have to do every day, so how can you possibly find the time to incorporate exercise into your day? Exercise takes time, and time is one luxury you just don't have.

Danny Demichelle

The ability to leave the daily stress behind us and to enter a land of pretending for a while is one of the best opportunities that traveling proposes. But when we go back home and measure our weight, the vacation ends and the feeling of happiness is replaced by guilt. It is because we remember how much we ate and how little we went for sport.

The problem consists in the difficulties to keep to our fitness regimen during the travel as well as to our sleeping and eating patterns. Who would travel to see the most beautiful places in the world and meanwhile to spend hours doing exercises?

Although the practice of yoga has become widespread during the last 30 years, there are still quite a few misconceptions about this ancient method of self-transformation. Here is a brief survey of the most common myths about yoga, and a look at what yoga is really all about.

1. Yoga is a sport: One of the important components of yoga is the practice of physical postures, known as asanas in Sanskrit. Due to this physical aspect of yoga, some people think of yoga as a sport or an activity akin to body building. In this sense, yoga is seen as a casual pastime which one can take up and practice now and then like any sport.

Michael Bens

Pilates is a technique of exercising devised by Joseph Pilates, a German National who as a frail child turned to exercise to strengthen his body. When he introduced the technique to America, I t instantly became a favorite among the dancers, who needed flexibility without bulking the muscles. And from there, the exercise grew to generally everyone who wants a low intensity workout. The benefits if a Pilates class is endless, not only does it help tone your body, it also helps your mind, kind of like yoga, but Pilates is most popular for its application to rehabilitation as well as to those people that are becoming weak with aging.

Mary Desaulniers

It is a simple question from a seven year old that starts me on a life review. ”Why do you run?” she asks when I stop for lemonade at her make-shift stand, the one sporting a sign that warms my heart: ” lemonaid 10 cents.”

But I can’t answer her. For several seconds, I sip at the cup and smile at her sun-freckled nose.

“Why?” she asks again.

“It makes me feel good,” I reply, tossing the paper cup into the garbage pail, glad that I can slip away without saying more. Her question unsettles me though. The answer I have so glibly thrown at her does not seem to ring true.

Chris Green

You’re right, the headline is a very strange one! Exercise is vital to maintain good health and most of the time, the benefits of exercise far out-weigh the drawbacks. But if you suffer from a stressful or a depressive illness, exercise can actually make you feel worse. But how can this be?

I’m sure you’ve heard the following statement over and over again: exercise can help you to beat stress, or alleviate anxiety or boost a depressed mind. This is only true in part. Because many exercises can actually worsen these illnesses. And even if you perform exercises that can help, these exercises will only help temporarily.

Jackie Stanley

1. Walking everyday promotes weight loss. If you move at a fairly brisk pace you can burn between 240 and 440 calories per hour of walking. This can translate into approximately one pound of weight loss per week or 52 pounds per year.

2. Walking everyday will increase your energy level. Energy comes from energy. That’s why the more you move, the more you feel like moving.

3. Walking everyday will support you in feeling good about yourself. There is an incredible sense of accomplishment that accompanies doing something that’s good for you.

4. Walking everyday will improve your ability to cope with stress. It will help you relax and better manage the unexpected twists and turns of everyday life.

Barrett Niehus

I was driving to work the other day, enjoying my obligatory glass of morning stimulant. This morning it was a can of Red Bull, I didn’t have time to stop at Starbucks, and I noticed that the primary ingredient in Red Bull is Taurine. After hearing their commercial on the radio, I got to thinking. How exactly does Red Bull work, and does it really give you wings? Does it give you more energy? Does it make you more alert?

Well, upon inspecting the ingredients and doing some research, which wasn’t hard working as a bulk vitamin distributor, I found that the Red Bull wings reference may be more geared to mental well being than to actual body energy. At least this may be the case with Taurine. As it turns out, Taurine is an amino acid that is used in our body for a number of activities. A couple of which are to act as a neural regulator, and to protect heart function. Substantial amounts of Taurine are also found in our eyes and stomach bile. There is no doubt that Taurine is beneficial, but I could not find any data that indicated it would give you an energy boost.