Get clean!

Photograph: David Schinman for Olive Head; Prop stylist: Andie Huber.com

It’s a new year, and you’ve resolved to lose weight while donating more money to charity, all in an effort to stop both smoking and making poor sexual choices. Congrats! Let us know how that goes.

In the meantime, the rest of us will be taking a more realistic approach to the new year.

We call it Get Your $#*! Together Month. In this first issue, we look to detox ourselves, targeting the one thing that makes each of us feel impure and ridding ourselves of it. To illustrate, we challenged a few New Yorkers to give up their vices (sugar, being late and saying like), and interviewed others who were trying to shake more serious addictions. One woman felt hamstrung by religion. A couple were suffocated by their codependent relationship. A third dude stopped taking his antidepressants. Read. Learn. Then check out the following three issues to build upon your newfound cleanliness—we’re covering gyms (Get fit!), making money (Get rich!) and mental health (Get sane!). It’s a four-issue program meant to ready you for a clean-slate 2008.

	No antidepressants: A film editor believes Prozac stifles his creativity—so he gives it up, without a doctor’s supervision.
	No religion: After 29 years of Orthodoxy, a Jewish day-school teacher tastes a different way of life—and wants more.
	No codependence: Elsa and Jack, both 31-year-old grad students, had to split to save themselves. They shared their story in separate interviews.
	No sugar: Our sweet freak freaks after cutting out the crystal.
	No being late: “Better late than never” doesn’t cut it when you gotta pay for every tardy.
	No saying like: A Generation Y-er bids her favorite word goodbye.
	The it’s-all-connected detox planner: Bad habits holding you back? Find your biggest vice and follow the dots to see how tips for tackling one negative trait can help you handle another.

	Quiz: How toxic are you?: You take pains to rid your personal environment of noxious influences. But what if you're the one poisoning the world around you?
	Your finest scour: Six easy ways to undo the damage of heavy holiday partying.
	Detox, one year later: It's been a whole calendar cycle since we asked our first crop of guinea pigs to go a month without potentially toxic elements of the New York lifestyle. Has it changed them?

Drama queen: You may not have heard of her, but England’s reigning interpreter of song is holding court here in NYC.