#12 There's 'selective outrage' in wellness and it's pretty darn ironic
It's been dumbbells at dawn for Gwyneth Paltrow's daily routine—but is this, at best, much ado about nothing? And, at worst, a backlash that only harms the most vulnerable?
The wellness world isn’t usually one to get too up in toned arms about things. After all, it doesn’t really go hand in hand with that coveted zen lifestyle. However, if there’s one woman to encourage the droves to throw off their weighted blankets and sheet masks, then it’s good old Gwyneth Paltrow. Before making a chic-cream-jumpered appearance at a Utah court this week over a skiing accident, she had vigorously stirred the pot on a podcast last Monday.
For the unaware, the Hollywood-actress-turned-wellness-figurehead, 50, was being interviewed by functional medicine practitioner Dr Will Cole (not, by his own admission, a medical doctor) on his The Art Of Being Well show, where she shared some snippets of her current lifestyle. The Goop founder was asked the question: ‘What’s your wellness routine look like now?’. The offending answer in written and TikTok form:
‘I eat dinner early in the evening. I do a nice intermittent fast. I usually eat something about 12 and in the morning I have things that won’t spike my blood sugar so that’s why I have coffee. But I really like soup for lunch. I have bone broth for lunch a lot of the days. Try to do one hour of movement, so I’ll either take a walk or I’ll do Pilates or I’ll do my Tracy Anderson. And then I dry brush and I get in the sauna. So I do my infrared sauna for 30 minutes and then for dinner I try to eat according to paleo—so lots of vegetables…It’s really important for me to support my detox.’
The main element irking everyone was Gwyneth’s seemingly extremely restrictive diet, with the body positivity influencer Alex Light joined by much of the internet in criticising her ‘hugely disordered eating’. Later on her Instagram, the one-time Oscar winner defended herself against the ‘backlash’, stating that she has been eating to ‘lower inflammation’ as part of her long Covid recovery and that her comments were ‘not meant to be advice for anybody else’.
Gwyneth added: ‘It's really just what has worked for me, and it's been very powerful and very positive. This is not to say I eat this way all day, every day. And by the way, I eat far more than bone broth and vegetables. I eat full meals, and I also have a lot of days of eating whatever I want. You know, eating french fries and whatever.’ To be fair, a quick scroll of her Instagram shows that food—albeit of the healthy kind—brings her joy:
What’s more, if we consider Cole’s actual questioning, Gwyneth wasn’t prompted to give a molecular account of every morsel that passes her lips. I’ve interviewed enough celebrities, influencers and experts about their nourishing diets over the years to know that—when you’re trying to put forward a certain kind of glowy, health-conscious image—you’re not exactly going to mention the cheese on toast followed by Ben & Jerry’s you enjoyed on Thursday night, are you?
Perhaps, Gwyneth should have been clearer that she was speaking in general terms about certain approaches to nutrition she finds helpful—although I doubt she thought anyone was interpreting her words as an exact food diary. What’s more, we should all know by now that when a star gives us an insight into their life, there may be something to flog, and so we should take what they say with a pinch of salt as it is. As writer Casey Johnston notes in her She’s A Beast newsletter, the former actress’ routine runs ‘just a laundry list of diet buzzwords that don't make sense together: intermittent fasting, bone broth, paleo, detox’.
I don’t doubt that Gwyneth practices what she preaches, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some embellishment given that she will intricately know what her Goop-guzzling audience like to hear. From vagina-scented candles to psychic vampire repellant spray, she knows that posturing towards the extreme end of wellness pays—and there’s a reason it’s a $250 million (£204 million) business that’s become a gold standard for dozens of celebrity copycats (Kourtney Kardashian’s Poosh, Kate Moss’ Cosmoss, Elle McPherson’s WelleCo, Halle Berry’s Re-Spin…).
Bitter truth
That being said, I obviously understand that for those who struggle with their relationship with food, such a conversation might be triggering. Maybe, one could argue that such ‘what I eat in a day’ pieces are problematic in general—like even this one, featuring a dietitian, published by The Guardian. Ditto those viral social media posts, which are no different. A better option could be simply focusing on digesting the broad principles of healthy eating rather than being hung up on the specifics.