I’m losing my appetite for Gwyneth and her good life
Stars like Gwyneth Paltrow are selling us a recipe for life that’s really for rich people,
IN news that shouldn’t really be news at all, Gwyneth Paltrow’s former chef revealed last week that the actress ‘‘ate nothing’’. Kate McAloon was employed by Paltrow and her then husband Chris Martin in 2008, and spoke in a recent interview of her shock at how strict the couple were with food. “They avoided any sugars, anything sweet, no dairy, just more vegetables,” said the chef, who found it nearly impossible to work within their restrictions.
Eventually she ended up sneaking forbidden ingredients into the meals — Chris and Gwyneth said her cooking had improved.
There were two things here that shook me to my core: Gwyneth Paltrow eats very few things. Gwyneth Paltrow has a chef.
Of course, these truth should be self evident. I like to see myself as a relatively savvy consumer of media, but I had totally fallen for it. Gwyneth with her shiny hair, Gwyneth with her preternaturally pert bottom, Gwyneth with skin that glows like the sun. Gwyneth with her cookbooks where she tells us how to be just like her. I believed it all. I thought she’d found the key to health.
The story is a good reminder that these aspirational people, these women who are influencers to so many of us whether we admit it or not, are not what they seem. To be that thin, you eat very little. But of course, we knew that. Gwyneth’s new year cleanse forbids dairy, sugar, red meat, nightshades like tomatoes and aubergines, caffeine and vegetable oils. It doesn’t leave much. She wrote at the beginning of this year: “I feel pure and happy and much lighter (I dropped the extra pounds that I had gained during a ma- jorly fun and delicious ‘relax and enjoy life phase’ about a month ago).”
The difference between clean eating and traditional dieting is that it tends to sell us this holistic idea of happiness and illusory ‘‘purity’’ as well as thinness — but we can’t say that, we must say ‘‘lightness’’. The fact that Gwyneth puts ‘‘relax and enjoy life’’ in inverted commas is revealing — it’s a bonkers aberration for her, and the few pounds that she has to show for actually enjoying herself must be eradicated. She unintentionally showed the truth of her way of life — purity and lightness are the opposites of relaxation and enjoyment.
We shouldn’t have needed her personal chef to tell us: Gwyneth doesn’t eat much and it’s completely miserable. But that knowledge is not as persuasive as the pictures we see of her, a glowing, beautiful picture of health. That’s the part that sticks.
Last month, her lifestyle brand Goop was criticised by an advertising watchdog for making false claims promoting products. The group conducted an investigation into Goop for using ‘‘unsubstantiated, and therefore deceptive, health and disease-treatment claims to market many of its products”.
The group drew attention to claims that walking barefoot “cures insomnia” and that the company’s signature perfume “improves memory” and can “work as antibiotics”. A lot of this stuff is harmless — a barefoot walk isn’t going to hurt you — but it feels exploitative in a time when so many of us feel powerless in the face of ill-health.
Supplements and remedies sold by Goop and the like are extremely expensive and doomed to disappoint. Turmeric will not prevent cancer, obviously. Matcha will not cure your depression, of course.
If we thought about it at all, of course we would know this. So why do we do it?
Wellness is like Santa. You know, deep down, that it simply can’t be true. But the idea is so seductive in its simplicity. It appeals to our idea of fairness. If you’re a good girl, you get presents; if you eat well, you don’t get cancer. The truth is, though, that life isn’t fair. Cigarettes and alcohol are killing us; gluten is not. We have so little control over these things that we want desperately to believe in something that isn’t the cruel randomness of life.
Our fear of sickness and fat is bankrupting us and making us miserable, neurotic and anti-social. Wellness is sold to us as a lifestyle for anybody — but it’s not. It’s a diet for rich people, who can afford to spend double on dairy and gluten alternatives. Have you seen the price of chia seeds?
It’s a diet for people who have time, time to make their own date and coconut balls for a mid-morning pick-me-up. It’s a diet for people who have chefs to cook all their meals for them, because thinking about food literally becomes a full-time job.
That’s what we tend to forget about the insta clean-eating crew: their hair is so glossy and abs so apparent because it’s their livelihood. It’s not for people like me and you.
Deliciously Ella and Gywneth Paltrow never come into contact with chocolate digestives, so avoiding them is easy. Their colleagues don’t bring in birthday cakes to pass around. Can you imagine having Gwyneth Paltrow over to dinner? Or having her kids on a play date? You just wouldn’t. They live in a really shiny, fragrant bubble.
A few former Instagram wellness influencers have turned their back on it in recent years. They have admitted it was making them sick and tired and paranoid. They have spoken about how it facilitated their eating disorders, that they just went from one kind of restriction to another.
Great British Bake-Off breakout star, Ruby Tandoh wrote that how it gave her “the means to rationalise my food insecurities, whilst glossing over my fear of food with the respectable veneer of health-consciousness”.
Gwyneth’s last cookbook was called It’s All Simple; her first one was It’s All Good. But being Gwyneth Paltrow is far from simple, and the reality of it definitely isn’t good. Gwyneth doesn’t and has never had a normal life. She can afford, financially and socially, to eat the way she does.
For us mere mortals, we need to be able to socialise, we need to be able to get a dinner together from whatever’s in the nearest shop, and we need to cook it ourselves. We can’t get away with ‘‘eating nothing’’ and we can’t get our own chefs to enable our neuroses. If we do manage to eat nothing, we’ll find ourselves sick and sad. It’s not all good being Gwyneth Paltrow — and that shouldn’t surprise us.
‘It’s for people who have time to make their own date and coconut balls’