What the hell is thin, beautiful, talented Gwyneth Paltrow doing fasting on live foods? If you don't know what a live food fast is, it just means that you drink (and sometimes eat) things that are totally raw. You can eat raw nuts and seeds, drink juiced kale, parsley and green chard or drink flax or olive oil. That's right, oil. Some people go even further. We know someone who did a live food fast and ate raw steak and raw fish for breakfast - bloody, fresh, raw meat. If she was in a rush, she would just blend the meat up with her green liquid and drink it like a milkshake. Yuck.
We don't care what kind of fast Gwyneth was doing, because we know that countless girls will hear this and think, "If skinny, gorgeous Gwyneth has to go on a fast in order to lose weight, then I need to go on a severe diet if I want to dream of ever looking anything like her." The idea of Gwyneth fasting will make other women think about their own "imperfections" and obsess about food and diets even more. It fuels these issues just like the crappy celebrity tabloids, and this nonsense has to STOP.
This is why we wrote HOW TO EAT LIKE A HOT CHICK - we want women to enjoy food again, celebrate it, and have all of the information they need to indulge in the foods they love and balance it out so that they start feeling hot. If you eat like a Hot Chick there is no need to go on a fast. We have actually been shocked to see that some diet books recommend fasts. Our book has inexplicably been compared to SKINNY BITCH, which suggests the very same "live food" fast that Gwyneth was allegedly doing. Talk about perpetuating a "quick fix" mentality instead of teaching women how to treat and feed themselves well throughout their lives.
Of course, nobody knows for sure if Gwyneth was hospitalized for fasting. That's just what the media told us. She could have been hospitalized for an ingrown toenail or a bladder infection, but the tabloids want us to think it was all for a diet because they seem to want women's lives to revolve completely around diets. But maybe it wasn't fasting itself that made Gwynny sick. Many live foods actually contain parasites, so maybe what little she was eating caused the hospitalization. But the sad part is that it doesn't matter. By simply telling women that Gwyneth was hospitalized for fasting, the tabloids have turned poor Gwyneth in to a bad role model who will end up making women feel worse about themselves. We're sure this was not Gwyneth's intention when she decided to try live foods.
This is the same thing that happened to Jennifer Love Hewitt and Tyra Banks. J-Love and Tyra are both gorgeous and perfect and make great role models for our young women, but when the tabloids ran photos of them in bikinis with nasty captions, it instantly turned them into negative icons. And it's not their fault. In a world where Hewitt is accused of being too fat at a size 2 and Tara Reid is attacked for being too skinny at a size 0, it's no wonder that women (Gwyneth included) are confused about what to eat. Again, this is why we wrote HOW TO EAT LIKE A HOT CHICK - to help end the vicious dieting cycle caused by these tabloids and fad diets (fasts included) and teach women how to make choices about food from a place of confidence rather than guilt or insecurity.
We, too, have been in the spotlight (though of course not at Gwyneth's level) and have experienced people judging us and saying mean things about our bodies and what we look like, and it HURTS. So even though we're mad at Gwyneth for thinking that she needs to fast in order to be healthy or skinny or whatever, we really just hope that she gets better and starts feeling like the total Hot Chick that she is--even if she did name her kid Apple.