A Former Goop Boss Just Called Out Gwyneth Paltrow's Brand For Its 'Toxic' Wellness Culture

"I refuse to punish myself with food."

Elise Loehnen. Right: Gwyneth Paltrow.

Elise Loehnen. Right: Gwyneth Paltrow.

Global Staff Writer

Gwyneth Paltrow's former right-hand woman at Goop is now calling out the company and its culture for pushing "toxic" diet habits.

Elise Loehnen, the former chief communications officer of the brand, took to Instagram this week to blast the company's wellness culture, and to explain how much better she feels about her body now that she left it behind.

Loehnen, who resigned from her role in October 2020, said the famous Goop cleanse led her to have a "distorted" body image, and she feels much better about herself now that she cut cleanses out of her life.

"When I left my job at Goop two years ago, I decided to foreswear all cleansing. To me, it had become synonymous with dieting and restriction, and I felt like I was not in a healthy relationship with my body, where I was always trying to punish it [and] bring it under control," she said in the video.

The 42-year-old added that she's been "eating like a teenager for two years and enjoying it," although she's now trying to find a balance between the extremes.

Then in her caption, she further described how she changed her lifestyle once she left the company, stating that she "vowed to never do another cleanse again."

"I refuse to punish myself with food, or hold myself under the weight my body seems to want to be anymore," she wrote.

Loehnen and Paltrow used to be super tight, and they famously appeared together in the 2020 Netflix series The Goop Lab before Loehnen resigned later that year.

Loehnen said when she left that she was planning to write a book, and Paltrow described her as a sister at the time, according to Newsweek.

"For the last seven years, and without her, Goop in this iteration wouldn't exist," said Paltrow. "She's also one of my favorite writers, and it's time for the world to finally see that with her impending book."

Paltrow and the Goop brand have not released a statement addressing the video.

  • Cata Balzano (she/her) was a Staff Writer for the Narcity Global Desk. With a Communications degree from Florida International University, she has worked with the Miami Herald, Billboard, Variety, and Telemundo within other media names, covering pop culture, fashion, entertainment and travel. Originally from South Florida, Cata grew up in a Colombian-Italian household, where she grasped a sense of a multicultural lifestyle from an early age. Cata speaks four languages, proudly owns three passports, and she has lived in Bogotá, New York City, Miami, London and the French Riviera before relocating to Rome in 2022. When she's not away exploring a new city, she is spending time around Italy with her French bulldog, Bentley.

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