Get the Gwyneth glow in time for Christmas

Bloated and jaded after overindulging on booze and mince pies? Help’s at hand from a very unlikely source — Gwyneth Paltrow! And love her or loathe her, it works

To be perfectly honest, Gwyneth paltrow is probably the last person I’d look to for advice on festive season over-indulgence. I’m not a Gwyneth fan. too shiny, too blonde, too skinny. And just, well, so annoyingly functional. I mean, what kind of a person grows up as Hollywood royalty (her father was bruce paltrow, a director and producer, her mother a successful tV and film actress) and doesn’t end up having at least one prolonged stay at the priory?

that said, I fully admit that my hostility towards her is a) irrational, and b) borne entirely out of jealousy. paltrow is the sort of person I always longed to be, the kind of sweet, girl-next-door blonde that men adore and women revere, the sort who looks just lovely wafting through a cornfield in a pretty summer dress.

even more annoyingly, she’s sharp as well as beautiful. She can act. She has a good business brain on her. She knows her own worth (and how many women can say that about

themselves?). When she started her ‘superblog’ Goop back in 2008, however, I thought she might at last have taken a wrong turn. It was unintentionally hilarious.

She appeared to have very little self-knowledge, sharing her impossibly lavish lifestyle with no trace of humility, clearly so entranced by her own fabulousness it never occurred to her that the world wouldn’t feel similarly.

The pretentiousness was off the scale. ‘When I pass a flowering zucchini plant in a garden, my heart skips a beat,’ she once wrote. ‘I’d rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a can,’ she told Jonathan Ross.

At one point she became very vocal about the cognitive properties of water, citing the ‘research’ of one Dr Emoto (who published his ‘findings’ in a coffee table book).

Emoto placed labels that said things such as ‘I Love You’ or ‘Peace’ on vials of polluted water, and after 24 hours, they produced gleaming, perfectly hexagonal crystals,’ she told Goop readers. The world roared with laughter.

But the truth is, as much as we loved to loathe our girl, we kept coming back for more.

Traffic to the site grew steadily and in 2013 Businessweek conceded that ‘its appeal begins to wash over you like the warm ocean off Santa Barbara, and after a while you stop laughing at those $935 leather-and-gunmetal pants from Rag & Bone. Instead, you want to own them.’

That sentiment pretty much encapsulated my experience with this new book of hers, Goop Clean Beauty. Although Paltrow has expressed a desire to step back from the brand in the near future and pays many tributes to her ‘team’, her fingerprints are all over this.

And, much as I wanted to rebel against it, I can’t tell a lie: it’s a bloody good beauty and general health guide.

So DETERMINED was I to give Paltrow a fair hearing that I decided the best way to test her advice was to embark on her beauty detox, which comprises the biggest chapter in the book and promised to give me a ‘palpable glow’.

Highly improbable, but I thought I would give it a go anyway.

I began by familiarising myself with Gwyneth’s list of banned substances. In no particular order: caffeine, alcohol, dairy, eggs, beef, pork, shellfish, raw fish, gluten, soy, tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries, oranges, bananas, corn, white rice, added sugar or peanuts.

Basically anything you ever want to eat.

madder still was the shopping list. I like to think of myself as a woman of the world, but I had never heard of half the ingredients, let alone seen them on the shelves at my local supermarket.

Wholegrain teff flour, wakame, bonito flakes, coconut sugar, white miso paste, snow peas, scallions, kimchi, chipotle powder, tamari, dashi, kohlrabi. An awful lot of cavolo nero (a fashionable Italian cabbage, it turns out).

once I had worked out that snow peas and scallions were just American for sugar snaps and spring onions, however, I was surprised at how easily I got hold of most of these ingredients. All but one was available on ocado, and that I picked up easily at the local health shop.

The recipes themselves are simple to knock together, and surprisingly tasty. I found myself supplementing many of them with roasted sweet potatoes (not on the banned list) just to add a bit of bulk.

But things such as her chocolate milkshake smoothie (made with cacao, almond milk and avocado), her creamy morning porridge and her grain bowls were properly delicious and very satisfying.

I found too that her ideas were remarkably clear and adaptable. After I had grasped the basic principles, it was easy to start making up my own recipes.

For example, I managed to concoct a fantastic turkey broth using white miso paste, cavolo nero, spring onions and some leftover meat from her turkey burgers.

To be fair, my husband grated half a block of Parmesan on it and ate it with crusty white bread and butter — but the principle was sound.

The key thing about this sort of food is that it triggers none of the usual salt/fat/ sugar pleasure sensors. So it feels a little, well, empty at first. But your tastebuds soon get used to the new textures and sensations, helped by the variety of flavours on offer.

In fact, I rather enjoyed my little detox journey, not least because it seemed to work.

The more of this stuff I consumed, the less of the other stuff I craved. And people kept telling me how nice I looked. one even mentioned the g-word (glow), although they didn’t specify whether it was ‘palpable’ or otherwise.

There were only two real difficulties: coffee and alcohol. I didn’t even bother giving up the former; I cut down substantially on the latter, but not entirely — it is Christmas after all.

Even so, I looked better and felt more energised.

I’ve also taken quite a bit away from the book. Quite a few of these new techniques have made their way into my everyday cooking.

The turkey burgers are a huge hit with the children, who, frankly, would be horrified if they knew how healthy they were. And the discovery of coconut sugar and white miso has been a revelation.

As for the chocolate milkshake smoothie... well, it’s a hit both as a breakfast staple and tarted up with a few chopped nuts and chilled for a post-supper dessert.

In short, damn you, Gwyneth Paltrow, damn you.

I thought her list of banned foods was totally mad. Then people started to tell me how good I looked