My Life As Gwyneth

Eric Ryan / Getty Images As Gwyneth Paltrow mulls turning her web site, GOOP, into a lifestyle empire, The Daily Beast’s Rebecca Dana mulls turning herself into Gwyneth. A story of dieting, detoxing, and dining with a Golden Girl—just like GOOP tells us to.

I started reading Crime and Punishment last month because Gwyneth Paltrow said to. According to the Oscar-winning actress, “the best way to relax before bed is to curl up by the fire with an amazing, transportive [sic] novel.” (Apart from watching a few minutes of a “forensic pathology documentary” on TV.) “I think there was something about the complexity of the protagonist’s psychology that made me feel like I wasn’t the most misunderstood person in the world,” Paltrow says of the Dostoevsky classic, which she first read in high school but has returned to many times since. “It was okay to be figuring out one’s own sense of right and wrong. In fact, it was one of life’s great endeavors.”

I recently embarked on another of life’s great endeavors. For the last three weeks, I’ve strived to follow every single recommendation from GOOP, Gwyneth’s weekly e-mail newsletter, in an effort to understand this complex star.

I found myself intrigued by her recommendation to “take your drinking water to the next level” with a $900 alkaline filtration system. What vegan shoe designer does Cameron Diaz recommend? I suddenly wanted to know.

In the GOOP-iverse, there are six points on the Star of Gwyneth: Make, Go, Get, Do, Be, See—the organizing principles behind her guide to better living, her gift to us. The advice ranges from wonderfully inspiring to hilariously impractical, internally inconsistent and outright absurd. In the name of GOOP, I have now given up white foods (bread, pasta), preserved foods (chips, cookies), toxic foods (candy, ice cream), and foods containing heavy metals (I never quite figured this one out). I have dutifully tried to rid myself of negativity and the inner gunk of past excess by drinking two tablespoons of olive oil every night before bed. I have done butt-lifting exercises in my living room, cultivated my “sticktoitiveness,” cooked enormous feasts one day and subsisted on kale and lemon water the next. I have given myself a five-minute makeover involving a tight drugstore headband and slathered home-made Turbinado sugar and coarsely ground coffee paste on my cheeks, to open up my pores. I have paired slouchy trousers with a shirt that has “some edge.” I have added adaptogenic herbal formulas to my morning routine and tried to eat in accordance with my body’s natural rhythms. I have experimented with four different recipes for chocolate chip cookies. I have practiced the African philosophy of ubuntu. I have purchased leggings.

And I have nourished my inner aspect.

Gwyneth has taken a lot of heat for her GOOP newsletter, with critics accusing her of being dense, illiterate, and out of touch. Then again, how hard is it to mock a Hollywood royal who describes cooking and food as “my main ancillary passions in life” and who turned to an “organic plastic surgeon” in 2007 when she got tired of her “saddlebags and post-pregnancy Shar-Pei-like stomach”? She drops names faster than she does pounds during a liquid cleanse (Wes Anderson, Jon Favreau, Sofia Coppola, Christy Turlington, “my friend Mark Bittman of The New York Times”), and her devotion to alternative medicine is just kind of creepy. She is so preoccupied with bowel movements that if she ever does expand the empire (as she has hinted), there could easily be a spinoff newsletter devoted solely to remedies for gastrointestinal “sluggishness.” No telling the potential web audience for POOP.

There’s a lot to scoff at here, but the three weeks I spent following GOOP were pure joy. Expensive, inconvenient and totally unsustainable—yes, but also full of unexpected pleasures. Instead of taking a vacation this summer, I lived like a world-famous actress obsessed with maple syrup, pseudo-science and Mario Batali. And just as Gwyneth did with Raskolnikov, I too found a special comfort in the complexity of my protagonist’s psychology. She may be tone-deaf and full of wacky ideas about food and religion, but she really just wants everyone to feel as good as she does. On a few occasions, I think I got close. My GOOP plan began with cynicism and failure, and by the end, I was cooking a giant pan-holiday dinner party with recipes from Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah and Valentine’s Day for my boyfriend, three girlfriends, and Rue McClanahan of The Golden Girls. It was a long, strange journey.