SUSANNA REID:
Scammers used me to sell dodgy diet pills
Surprise, surprise, Gwyneth paltrow’s Goop lifestyle brand is at it again. An article about healthy eating advises her fans to aim for their ‘leanest liveable weight’.
i’m not signed up to Goop. Funnily enough, i’m not in the market for a £126 stone essential oil diffuser. But these words set all my alarm bells ringing.
After all, as Cambridge scientist Giles Yeo, an expert in how our brains control our weight, rightly says, ‘many people will take it to mean they should be as thin as possible’.
Yikes. When i waded through the pseudoscience in the offending piece — an interview with u.s. psychologist Traci Mann — i found Traci isn’t quite saying that, thank heavens. she’s since insisted: ‘The article is specifically about not trying to lose too much weight and not doing anything unhealthy or extreme. The phrase “leanest liveable weight” refers to the leanest weight you can be without strict dieting.’
But i read every word, and i agree with Dr Yeo: the language is wide open to misinterpretation — especially when it’s read by eager-to-be-thin Goop fans, who would do anything to have a figure like Gwyneth.
it’s just the latest in a long line of bizarre and controversial endorsements by Goop for the likes of bee-sting facials, ‘moon dust’ smoothies and, most disturbingly, vaginal steaming — which left one woman with severe burns.
Gwyneth’s response is to say she doesn’t read everything on Goop. That’s not good enough. people with her profile and influence need to be aware that power and success come with responsibility.
You are accountable to people who look up to you, and if her website — which is reportedly worth millions — promotes advice that might be misinterpreted by those susceptible to eating disorders, that accountability isn’t being upheld.
Gwyneth may claim she’s just as entitled as anyone else to share opinions online, but the truth is people buy into products endorsed by celebrities, so we have to be extra careful. That’s something i learned when i got caught in a diet scandal myself.
six months ago, i received a message on social media from a follower, complaining she hadn’t received the ‘keto diet pills’ she’d ordered after i allegedly claimed they’d helped me shed almost two stone.
Other messages followed: one woman said her mother paid £100 after seeing me ‘advertise’ the pills, but they’d never arrived.
Then people told me they’d seen dodgy ads for the pills with my face on pop up on Facebook — a site which is itself one of the main drivers of the ‘compare and despair’ culture, prompting people to look for easy weight-loss answers in the first place.
i was furious and upset. i don’t credit diet pills for my weight loss. i would never flog any ‘weight-loss’ supplement. it was all a con by scammers who’d used my photo. still, i was devastated that people were out of pocket because of an ad falsely bearing my name.
i also faced inquiries from friends concerned i had packed in my job to go into the weightloss industry. One celebrity pal asked for help for a relative to lose weight, while a respected journalist wanted to slim for a wedding. i was outraged and horrified at how quickly this scam spread, all on the strength of my supposed endorsement.
Luckily, the Advertising standards Authority stepped in to take the ads down. But the sorry affair taught me how powerful a celebrity’s face on a diet product can be — which is why it’s enormously irresponsible to put anything out there without careful scrutiny.
Losing weight should be done for health, not because a star claims to have a magic product or formula. A website run by a Hollywood beauty needs to hold sacred its responsibility to readers when it talks about weight loss. E ven using the word ‘leanest’, for instance, presents many of us with an impossible task. My natural curviness means i will never be considered lean. i can be healthy, but lean — no.
When i did lose weight, by the way, i did it because my doctor recommended it. My secret isn’t a pill. i took individual steps to eat more healthily, cutting down on unhealthy snacking and the empty calories of alcohol.
i don’t have a secret weapon or a magic tablet.
And neither does Gwynnie.