Gwyneth Paltrow has responded to the backlash over her now viral wellness routine and daily diet.
The 50-year-old took to her Instagram Story to address how she felt about the criticism during a Q&A session, after her episode on Dr Will Cole’s The Art of Being Well podcast, where she opened up about her “intermittent fast” routine.
In the backlash to the podcast on TikTok, fans claimed that the actor wasn’t eating enough sustainable food throughout the day. Dietitians also agreed with this criticism and claimed that Paltrow was promoting disordered eating habits.
On her Instagram Story on Friday, Paltrow began by making an important note about the podcast and who she was doing it with, as Cole is her own doctor. She also shared more details about her physical health.
“This is a person I’ve been working with for over two years, now, to deal with some chronic stuff,” the Iron Man star explained, as she noted that she’s been experiencing post-Covid symptoms. “The way it manifests for me is very high levels of inflammation over time, so I’ve been working with Dr Cole to really focus on foods that aren’t inflammatory.”
She explained that she’s been eating a lot of “cooked vegetables, all kinds of proteins,” and “healthy carbs” to lower inflammation. Paltrow emphasised that this routine is based on her own “medical results” and “extensive testing” that she’s done “over time”, so it wasn’t a diet that she was recommending to other people.
“This was a transparent conversation with me and my doctor,” she said. “It’s not meant to be advice for anyone else. It’s really just works for me, and it’s been very powerful and very positive.”
Paltrow further clarified that habits that she mentioned on the podcast is not the way that she eats “every day”.
“And by the way, I eat far more than bone broth and vegetables,” she said, referring to the two foods she listed as her meals in Cole’s podcast. “I eat full meals, and I also have a lot of days of eating whatever I want. And eating you know french fries and whatever.”
The Goop founder concluded her statement by acknowledging the “goal” of her eating routine, explaining: “My baseline really has been to try to eat healy and eat foods that will really calm that inflammation down.”
As noted by the National Institutes of Health, prolonged inflammation has been linked to symptoms of Long Covid. For example, the organisation found that inflammation around the brain could have an effect on someone losing their sense of smell for a while due to Covid.
During her appearance on The Art of Being Well, Paltrow gave a rundown of her wellness and eating routine, which included coffee in the mornings, “bone broth” for lunch at 12pm, and then vegetables or fish for dinner at 6pm. Her comments quickly sparked backlash, with dietitian Kim Linsday telling The Independent that the actor was describing problematic eating habits.
“Paltrow is promoting many restrictive diets such as intermittent fasting, replacing meals with low calorie fluids (coffee and bone broth) and detoxing,” she said. “We know that diets are unsustainable and can lead to weight cycling, increased risk of chronic disease and eating disorders.”
She added: “While there is nothing wrong with the food she is eating, the problem comes back to how little she is eating and how much she is restricting. There is nothing healthy or sustainable about that and it should not be promoted as a healthy diet.”
Other celebrities have also responded to Paltrow’s eating routine, including model Tess Holliday. As she pointed out her own eating disorder and said that she wasn’t “judging” the Transformers star, she still thought that “bone broth is not a suitable meal”.
“And then to end your day with just eating vegetables? But yet people continue to give her airtime, to give her a platform, to take her ‘advice’, because everyone is too afraid to be fat,” Holliday said.
She continued: “I’m not here to judge what people put in their bodies, especially as someone that has a restrictive eating disorder. And I get mocked all the time, because I’m fat, so how dare I talk about not feeding my body, right? But this s*** isn’t normal, and it’s affecting a whole other generation of young folks who think that eating like ‘GP’ is appropriate, is OK.”
