Clean eating

While many a juice cleanse recipe will tell you the liquid diet commitment lasts a week, we’ve heard a one-day juice fast is just as good for clearing out those stubborn toxins. Start with a day of eating mostly fruit and vegetables, cutting out dairy, meat and grains if possible, so there’s only easy-to-break down nourishment filling your body. The following day, you’re on to a juice-only regime. Citrus fruits help speed up digestion, so opt for a fruit blend in the morning, while come lunchtime a concoction of carrot, beetroot, celery, cucumber and ginger is a sufficient meal replacement. Allow yourself about six juices during the day, with a rewarding cup of green tea before bed. Healthy eaters can manage a juice detox once a week, or aim for five days of clean eating once a month. The smaller milestones will be more achievable than past long-running diet attempts.

Culture shock

Between Brisbane Powerhouse, Judith Wright Centre and QPAC, there’s enough theatre shows and puzzling cabaret performances to make 2014 a year of social outings. Book tickets to see shows outside your usual genre of interest and surprise yourself with merriment that ensues. Go see a gig next time you’re filled with cabin fever and hankering to get out of the house on a weeknight. Discover some new bands, or perhaps even a whole new genre to covet, and buy a band t-shirt to proudly pass down to the grandkids from your ‘wild rocker’ days.

Literary habits

When we thought about setting ourselves a reading goal for the year, we were going to aim for one book per month. But that adds up to only 12 books per year, and we thought we could do better. So we’ve set ourselves the goal of reading one book per fortnight, as well as not allowing our magazine addiction to get the better of us by reading one new journal per week. Find sneaky moments to nose-dive into these knowledge-filled pages on the bus to work, while you’re waiting for your coffee order, during your lunch break and read a chapter before bed. Each little effort will soon add up.

Keep on learning

While sometimes the last thing we want to do at the end of a work day is strain our minds through three hours of foreign-language learning, the resulting feeling when you start dreaming in French or when the abililty to draw katakana finally clicks feels so rewarding. Channel those dreams of wanderlust into learning the languages for each of the new countries you plan to visit in 2014. If you start one new language each year (even if you only do a couple of courses), you’ll have picked up five new languages in five years. Expand your Latin-based languages here, here or here, or try your tongue at Norwegian, Hebrew or Swahili at IML.

Take up a hobby

Teach yourself to tie rope knots, take up a welding course, learn floristry or aim to bake your way through the My New Roots blog, one recipe per day. We’ve also got our heart set on learning to play the ukulele and taking up bird watching on our weekend bushwalks.