Gwyneth Paltrow's former right-hand woman reveals how Goop's detox cleanses 'distorted' her body image
Not gonna lie, we will never tire of writing about Gwyneth Paltrow’s health and wellness brand Goop. What’s not to love - she makes controversial jade eggs, she makes NSFW-scented candles, she even tries to rope Kim Kardashian into the enterprise by making her an “orgasm-scented” candle, whatever the heck that means. Even Gwyneth’s own daughter loves to dunk on Goop. Now, joining in on the fun, is someone from actually inside Gwyneth’s and Goop’s inner circle, and all joke’s aside, she reveals some concerning details about the detox cleanses pushed by Goop.
Elise Loehnen was Goop’s Chief Content Officer for six years until she left the company in 2020. Now she’s posted to her Instagram a video where she talks about the “toxic wellness culture" at Goop and how Goop’s cleanses are "synonymous with dieting and restriction" that resulted in her having an "unhealthy" relationship with her own body.
Loehnen, who was a regular face in the Netflix series The Goop Lab, admits right off the top of the video that she “decided to foreswear” all cleanses after leaving Goop, adding that putting her body through those cleanses left her feeling like she was "always trying to punish [her body], bring it under control."
Writing in the caption that in the ensuing two years she has been eating the same foods as her teenage kids, and enjoying life, she adds, “I needed to break a tendency to be critical and punishing. To chastise myself. All of it. I stopped weighing myself completely.”
Before you think she’s done with cleanses for good, Loehnen then admits that she just finished a five-day cleanse sold by Kroma Wellness, which she says allows her to eat extra veggies and protein beyond what is laid out by the cleanse instructions – a practice that helped heal what Goop had damaged.
She says directly to camera, “I'm not weighing myself, I'm allowing myself to eat beyond what's necessarily prescribed by the cleanse. But I'm just trying to get to a place where I can again be in conversation with my body as those conversations had become distorted.”
She then adds in the caption, “It didn't feel restrictive, at all, I wasn't hungry, and I felt much better after. What's more exciting is that I didn't retaliate by eating badly immediately. It just released me into a new, slightly healthier lane.”
"I refuse to punish myself with food, or hold myself under the weight my body seems to want to be anymore," she concluded. "I don't have the energy or the interest, thankfully. (And more importantly, I've come to realize that I really like my body and am grateful it is mine.) Hopefully I've broken that cycle for good."
This is a huge 180 for the Oscar-winning actress’s former right-hand woman, who said previously when interviewed that the Shakespeare In Love star was an "inspiration," who "isn't advertising short cuts."
She also slammed Goop’s critics in 2020 for labeling the company’s treatments as “pseudoscience,” saying they never said there was “conclusive evidence” behind the products and trends they were selling. PEOPLE reached out to Goop for comment but so far there has been no reply. However we do know that of all the detox cleanses the company sells, and there are a lot, none of them include Kroma Wellness.
