Gwyneth Paltrow’s former right-hand says “toxic health culture” –

Gwyneth Paltrow’s former right-hand man at Goop has spoken out against the “toxic culture of wellness and purification” and has declared that she staged a “total rebellion” against her woo woo lifestyle when she stepped down from her role at the brand. after years of “punishing” his body.

Elise Loehnen, 42, from Los Angeles, served as Goop’s chief content officer until October 2020 and abruptly stepped down, claiming she would take a year off to write a book.

But Loehnen, who has appeared on the controversial Netflix series The Goop Lab with Paltrow, 49, and hosts the brand’s podcast, has shed more light on the true reason why he’s leaving the company in a new Instagram video where he talks about the harmful effects. health regimens and “toxic” cleansing.

“When I quit my last job at Goop about two years ago, I decided to quit all cleaning,” the mother-of-two began her video.

Loehnen, 42, from Los Angeles, says in a video she shared on Instagram that she spent years “punishing” her body while doing meticulous cleanings like the ones touted by Goop.

“It became synonymous with diets and restrictions for me, and I felt like I didn’t have a healthy relationship with my body where I was always trying to punish it, to keep it under control.”

In the clip’s title, Loehnen went into more detail, explaining that he had “totally rebelled” after breaking up with Goop 17 months ago, in an attempt to break his body’s “tendency to be critical and punish.”

“When I left Goop, I promised I’d never clean again and I totally rebelled, which was pretty fun and absolutely healthy in that I let go of ideas of what my body should look like at 42.” He had two children,” she wrote.

‘I had to break the tendency to be critical and punitive. To punish myself. Everything. I completely stopped weighing myself.

Loehnen admitted in her video that she “eats like a teenager for two years” and added that she “enjoyed” the freedom that comes with letting go of food-centric rules and restrictions.

However, she admitted that she had reached a point where her “stomach hurts often” before she started advertising Kroma Wellness, a “beautiful new” detox program she described as “five days of recovery.”

Kroma’s program is not currently one of the cleaners sold or displayed on Goop’s website.

According to Loehnen, the five-day cleanse was “really perfect”—despite her initial concern about “hating everything.”

“I’m doing something completely different this time,” she continued, apparently comparing her latest detox to the rigorous cleansing type so commonly used by Paltrow and Goop.

“I don’t weigh myself down, I let myself eat more than I need to cleanse. But I’m just trying to get to a place where I can talk to my body again because those conversations are distorted.

Loehnen says she “given up on all cleaning” after leaving the role of Goop and “totally rebelled” after years of “punishing” her body.

‘I had to break the tendency to be critical and punitive. To punish myself. Everything. I stopped weighing myself completely,” he explained.

Loehnen was chief content officer for Goop before leaving in October 2020; She has also appeared in the controversial Netflix series The Goop Lab (pictured) with Paltrow, 49.

“I never felt constrained, I wasn’t hungry, and I felt so much better afterwards. What’s even more exciting is that I didn’t immediately react by eating badly. It just got me into a slightly healthier new job.

Goop currently has more than a dozen different types of cleanses and detoxes on its website, from do-it-yourself programs and recipes to ready-to-use packs.

Loehnen noted that she tried to lead a more balanced and healthy lifestyle – not by giving her stomach ache, but without the “punitive” restrictions that governed her diet and regularly saw her “punishing herself with food”.

“I refuse to punish myself with food or go under the weight my body no longer wants to be,” she said.

“I have neither the energy nor the attention, thank goodness. (First of all, I realized that I truly love my body, and I am grateful that it is mine.) I hope I have broken this cycle forever.”

Loehnen’s public denunciation of “toxic” health culture comes less than two years after he left his position at Goop, where he worked for six years, after being hired as Paltrow’s second source for the brand in 2014.

The former head of content was Paltrow’s second-in-command for most of her time at the company, and has appeared alongside the actress on the controversial Netflix series The Goop Lab, where they explore a variety of different trends and treatments for energetic and healthy living. Healing for psychedelics.

In January 2020, Loehnen came out to protect Goop and Paltrow from critics who claimed to support the company’s “dangerous” and “pseudo-science” fashions. Digiday said the brand never claimed to have “conclusive evidence” behind the trends it tried and announced.

The former Goop executive seen with Paltrow was one of many employees who resigned between 2019 and 2021 over allegations of the company’s “financial culture”.

“We are very clear,” he said. “People like to say this is pseudoscience. But pseudoscience turns out when you present something and say, “Science shows it can cure cancer,” which we would never do.

“We label all of our content, and many of them come from Western doctors, PhD students from leading institutions, and are now part of the scientific canon. Typically, research is ten years ahead of where doctors are in terms of how long it takes to put it into practice… But never, “Oh We don’t say, ‘There’s all this convincing evidence.

It seems Loehnen had been happy to not only drink Goop-flavored Kool-Aid for years but also promote it, which made his abrupt departure from the company even more surprising.

But his departure came at a time of upheaval for Paltrow’s wellness brand, with Business Insider reporting in October 2021 that the company had lost 140 employees in just two years.

Although the pandemic has caused some staff cuts, sources have argued to the store that Goop’s high sales problem preceded the COVID-related layoffs and that stingy wages, a “culture of taxation” and Paltrow’s habit of picking favorites and then apparently changing his mind. about the reason.

Other former employees from the company who complained about Glassdoor also criticized “bullies” and “bad girls” who rely on “fear-based management”, saying Paltrow in particular “wanted to spend the day, try on clothes”. the company desperately needed a real CEO”.

Loehnen wasn’t the only senior to leave the brand; former CFO Erica Moore left August last year to become self-employed, while former CTO Juan Paul Ramirez left Goop three and a half years later in May 2021 to join Boosted Commerce a few months later.

CRO Kimberly Kreuzberger, who joined Goop in 2015, also left at the end of 2019 to start her own business. Attorney General Virginia Llewellyn also left.