Gwyneth Paltrow’s Former Goop CCO Calls out Company for How It ‘Distorted’ Her Body Image

Former Goop CCO Elise Loehnen is calling out Gwyneth Paltrow and her company for “distorting” her body image while working there. Loehnen, who exited the company in 2020 to embark on her own business ventures, opened up on Instagram about how the various Goop cleanses changed her perception of healthy body practices. 

Along with a host of eccentric offerings like Paltrow’s orgasm-scented candle, Goop offers a list of cleansing options for its readers –– even hosting a large cleanse at the beginning of each year for its audience. After leaving, Loehnen says she’s “decided to foreswear any 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 wrote, adding that her new practice of the last two years has been to eat “like a teenager for two years and enjoying it.” 

She says she finds the switch to be “definitely healthy in terms of letting go of ideas of what my body should look like as a 42-year-old who has had two kids,” she said in the caption. “I needed to break a tendency to be critical and punishing. To chastise myself. All of it. I stopped weighing myself completely.”

Loehnen has since started her own podcast Pulling the Thread and authored a book since leaving the wellness company. “When I talked with my friend @ellenvoramd on Pulling the Thread recently, we explored diet and she reminded me that wellness culture can be toxic AND that eating an abundance of overly processed foods can also be toxic,” she said. “And I realized in that moment that I’ve kind of deserted how my body actually feels – as much as I’ve enjoyed two years of eating whatever my young kids want. And that I’m clearly being called back to a place somewhere in the middle because my stomach often hurts.”

“I refuse to punish myself with food, or hold myself under the weight my body seems to want to be anymore,” she added. “I don’t have the energy or the interest, thankfully. (And more importantly, I’ve come to realize that I really like my body and am grateful it is mine.) Hopefully, I’ve broken that cycle for good.”

Neither Paltrow nor Goop has publicly commented on the development.