Former Goop boss criticises ‘toxic wellness culture’ and recalls ‘always trying to punish’ body

Elise Loehen, former chief content officer of Gwyneth Paltrow’s company Goop, has spoken candidly about how “toxic” wellness culture can be and her relationship with her body after working for the brand.

Loehen made multiple appearances on the Netflix series The Goop Lab and co-hosted the Goop podcast with Paltrow. However, in October 2020, Loehen decided to step down from her position with the company. At the time, Loehen said that was working on her book, a nonfiction piece that was going to be published by The Dial Press.

Although it’s been almost two year since her departure, Loehen recently opened up how working at Goop impacted her mindset in a video posted to Instagram, in which she said that there was a time where she wanted to “foreswear cleansing” after leaving the company. According to Loehen, when she left Goop, she was in a place where she felt like she had to “punish” her body through “cleansing,” and noted that she felt the wellness method had become synonymous with “dieting” and “restriction”.

“To me, [cleansing] 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, bring it under control,” she said. “I’ve been eating like a teenager for two years and enjoying it, to be honest.”

In the caption, she recalled how she also entered into a “rebellion” against dieting, which allowed her to be much less “critical” towards her body.

“I vowed to never do another cleanse again and went into full rebellion, which has been kind of fun, and 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 wrote. “I needed to break a tendency to be critical and punishing. To chastise myself. All of it. I stopped weighing myself completely.”

She then recalled how she’s since spoken with her friend, Ellen Vora, MD, about dieting and how wellness culture can be “toxic,” with Loenhen explaining that she has come to the realisation that she’s also spent the last two years ignoring how her body “actually feels”.

“Wellness culture can be toxic AND that eating an abundance of overly processed foods can also be toxic,” she wrote. “And I realised 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.”

In the clip, she went on to describe a five-day cleanse she recently tried and how she hopes it’ll allow her to communicate better with her body and physical health. However, she noted that she decided to do the cleanse “differently”. “I didn’t weigh myself, before, during, after, and I chose the version that lets you eat extra veggies and proteins as you want,” she explained.

“I’m just trying to get to a place where I can again be in conversation with my body, as those conversations had become distorted,” she added.

open image in gallery

In 2020, Paltrow thanked Loehen for helping her build the brand and applauded her success as a writer.

“Elise has been my counterpart in building this business for the last seven years, and without her, Goop in this iteration wouldn’t exist,” the actor told Women’s Wear Daily. “Elise is like a sister to me, and I plan to watch proudly as she enters this monumental stage in her professional life.”

Over the last few years, Goop has been called out for creating a poor work environment. According to employee reviews posted on Glassdoor, and reported by the DailyMail, the wellness company has been described as a “toxic” workplace, with “fear-based management” and a “mean girl vibe.”

According to Insider, more than 140 employees had been laid off or resigned from the company from 2019 to September 2021. Some of them spoke to the publication and cited low pay, burnout, and difficult leadership as the reasons why they left Goop, which started in 2008 as a newsletter and is now a well-known lifestyle brand.

The Independent has contacted Goop for comment.