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"  Before any of this happened \u2014 before I started spending hundreds of dollars at health-food stores to starve myself, before I found myself vomiting off a subway platform during rush hour, before I took up dancing around my living room like a meth head \u2014 I felt bad. Not in the way that Michael Vick feels bad about those dogs, and not in the way that Michael Bay should feel bad about that Transformers sequel, but in the way that a lot of men who eat poorly and drink too much and don&amp;#039;t exercise enough usually feel bad. If I wasn&amp;#039;t hungry, I was stuffed; if I wasn&amp;#039;t hopped up on caffeine, I was exhausted; if I wasn&amp;#039;t stressed, I was bored. I&amp;#039;ve asked my G.P. about it a few times, and he&amp;#039;s told me he hears similar complaints from patients all the time. We&amp;#039;re not really sick. There&amp;#039;s nothing really wrong with us. We just feel lousy.  That&amp;#039;s how another G.P. came to enter my life. Gwyneth Paltrow used to be an actress. A pretty good one, too, with a pleasant, watchable face and an ear for the Queen&amp;#039;s English, but today she&amp;#039;s better known for her other occupations. Wife of a rock star. Friend to the famous. Prestige name in popcorn flicks. And to the 150,000 or so subscribers to her free weekly newsletter and Web site, Goop, a lifestyle guru trying to help others &amp;quot;nourish [their] inner aspect.&amp;quot; Paltrow launched Goop last fall, her topics of discussion ranging from diet and exercise to spirituality and shopping, and in her mission statement (or introductory essay, or whatever you want to call it, though it&amp;#039;s since been removed from the site), she summed up her weltanschauung thus: &amp;quot;My life is good because I am not passive about it. I want to nourish what is real, and I want to do it without wasting time... Make your life good. Invest in what&amp;#039;s real. Cook a meal for someone you love. Pause before reacting. Clean out your space. Read something beautiful... Learn something new. Don&amp;#039;t be lazy. Work out and stick with it...&amp;quot; You get the picture. She does all this for free, in her spare time, and she&amp;#039;s not selling a book or a movie or a line of Paltrow&amp;#039;s Organic Whatever. She only wants to help.  Now, she has her critics (Toronto&amp;#039;s Globe and Mail wondered why it was called Goop rather than &amp;quot;Learn from Me, Ungrateful Peasant,&amp;quot; and Gawker.com refers to it as her &amp;quot;death cult&amp;quot;), and they raise legitimate questions, namely: Who exactly does Paltrow think she is? And: Why should anyone take lifestyle advice from a celebrity? (&amp;quot;That kind of stuff is just noise to me,&amp;quot; she told USA Today.) But there is an issue of far greater importance here that no one seems to be talking about: What if she&amp;#039;s actually right? What if Paltrow has the secrets to a good, long, happy life and all the cynics are like those Romans who rolled their eyes at Jesus? I decided to put her theories to the test. I would read all her newsletters and regard her every word as gospel, and maybe I might feel good after a few weeks of the Goop life. It&amp;#039;s not as if I could feel any worse. * * * * * THE GOOP MATRIX: Do Paltrow&amp;#039;s Prescriptions Make Any Sense? * * * * * &amp;quot;It is that time of year, folks. I need to lose a few pounds of holiday excess. Anyone else? I like to do fasts and detoxes a couple of times during the year.&amp;quot; (Goop Newsletter No. 15) First of all, you&amp;#039;ve probably got Paltrow all wrong. She&amp;#039;s not a vegan. She&amp;#039;s not macrobiotic. (She was for a while, until she wasn&amp;#039;t.) She eats like a lot of women with exorbitant grocery budgets and kids named after inanimate objects. &amp;quot;I try to eat locally, seasonally, and always organically. I don&amp;#039;t eat processed foods or red meat and I try to stay away from sugar and dairy.&amp;quot; Easy enough. But she is also a fan of detoxing, devoting not one but two newsletters to the joys of ridding one&amp;#039;s body of poison. My first step to feeling good, I realized, would be Paltrow&amp;#039;s seven-day detox diet. Her meal plan cut out all dairy, gluten, meat, shellfish, condiments, sugar, alcohol, caffeine, and an entire class of food (tomatoes, eggplant, potatoes, and peppers) called nightshades. (Who knew?) Her menus were simple: For breakfast I consumed blueberry-and-almond-milk smoothies (fortified with protein and probiotic supplements), and for lunch and dinner I alternated among Paltrow&amp;#039;s recipes for light salads and thin soups. (The full seven-day menu  is on goop.com.) Over the course of a single week I spent about $300 at a cluttered health-food market, and every night I spent about an hour preparing the next day&amp;#039;s meals. For those first few days, I felt terrible, and looking over my notes from that period, I&amp;#039;m kind of amazed I stuck with it.  Day one: Feel incredibly strange, if not a little better. Lighter. Someone in the office says I look pinker. Day two: Feel hungover. The hunger isn&amp;#039;t in my stomach but in my throat. I am craving KFC. I never crave KFC. I don&amp;#039;t even like KFC. And yet I want it. My tongue feels swollen. I have a headache. This, I am told, is part of the natural detoxification process. It blows. Day three: The world has lost all its sharp edges. My thoughts are sluggish. I sat through a story meeting and didn&amp;#039;t say a single word. I wonder if I&amp;#039;ll get fired. I became irritable and irrational, especially when, on the second night of the diet, I had to excuse myself from a subway car so I could vomit over the side of the platform. (Reactions from fellow commuters ranged from &amp;quot;Dude!&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;You nasty.&amp;quot;) And to add insult to injury, nobody wanted to hear about how bad I felt. All anybody wanted to talk about was how things were going down in the bathroom. In the interest of full and accurate disclosure, let me put it this way: You know that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Nazis open the ark and unleash the wrath of God? It was kind of like that, only with fewer survivors.  Yet... after four or five days, I noticed a change. I stopped craving coffee. I felt a steady stream of energy all day long. There was, in fact, a spring in my step. My mind wasn&amp;#039;t quite as sharp as it used to be, and I had trouble concentrating during meetings, but physically speaking, I felt recharged. After a week, I resumed normal eating, keeping Paltrow&amp;#039;s prescriptions in mind: No red meat. Organic vegetables. Lots of water. I couldn&amp;#039;t eat or drink much at parties or weekend barbecues, but there&amp;#039;s more to life than fun and parties, right?  * * * * * THE GOOP MATRIX: Do Paltrow&amp;#039;s Prescriptions Make Any Sense? * * * * * (Story continues on next page...) &amp;quot;Spring is springing! The optimism inherent in the first blossoms says it all \u2014 that is, until you realize that bathing suit season is closer than you think... I asked the cutest, most motivated, most genius trainer on earth to jumpstart our spring fitness regimes...&amp;quot; (Goop Newsletter No. 27) Tracy Anderson is a taut little blond who serves as Paltrow&amp;#039;s personal trainer and the unofficial fitness coach of Team Goop. Her specialty is dance cardio, and lucky for me, she sells an instructional DVD that Paltrow uses when Anderson&amp;#039;s not available for personal sessions. Every night for two weeks, I&amp;#039;d come home from work, do whatever cooking I had to do for the next day, close the curtains of my ground-floor living-room windows, and cue up the DVD to where I&amp;#039;d left off.  Anderson offers a variety of routines that quicken your pulse and focus on different muscle groups \u2014 your lats, your abs, your quads \u2014 while you&amp;#039;re dancing to the kind of unsk-unsk-unsk techno music popular in former Soviet republics. I followed Anderson&amp;#039;s bouncing and reaching and lunging and kicking as best as I could, all while trying to reconcile myself with the fact that I was a grown man dancing \u2014 really, really dancing \u2014 all by myself. This dilemma was brought into greater relief when I forgot to close my curtains one night and my dancing was interrupted by three neighborhood kids pointing and laughing through the window. That my wife tends to work late and missed out on these opportunities for laughs \u2014 well, I&amp;#039;ll have to make it up to her. Most of the time, especially when I was detoxing, I tried to reason my way out of it. I did it yesterday. I&amp;#039;ll do it tomorrow. I look like Elaine from Seinfeld. I look like Richard Simmons. But then I&amp;#039;d remember Paltrow&amp;#039;s advice \u2014 &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t be lazy. Work out and stick with it&amp;quot; \u2014 and I would get to it. I can&amp;#039;t say I enjoyed a single second of my time with Anderson, or that I&amp;#039;d second Paltrow&amp;#039;s description of her as &amp;quot;an organic plastic surgeon,&amp;quot; or that I&amp;#039;ll ever dance at a wedding again without looking around for those snickering neighborhood punks, but for a guy who hates to exercise, there are worse ways to get your heart pumping and your muscles moving. Not many, but a few.  * * * * * THE GOOP MATRIX: Do Paltrow&amp;#039;s Prescriptions Make Any Sense? * * * * * &amp;quot;One day, when being treated by an acupuncturist, a Spanish friend... remarked that I looked like a bull who&amp;#039;d had a run in with the picadores... I assured her that although I was stuck with needles, I was faring far better than the bull would in the analogous scenario. In fact, those many little needles have helped me through many an ailment.&amp;quot; (Goop Newsletter No. 39) I&amp;#039;d never been asked by someone if they could check my pulses. My pulse, sure. But there are six pulses in Chinese medicine, and now I was sitting in the office of the acupuncturist I found through Goop, preparing to pay a woman $275 for a consultation and treatment. Acupuncture, Goop tells me, can help cure anything from chronic pain to acne, but my problems weren&amp;#039;t so specific. On my intake form, I wrote &amp;quot;feel better&amp;quot; as my only goal for treatment, and when I sat down with the acupuncturist, we talked about me. What I ate. When I slept. The frequency and consistency of my bowel movements. (Again with the potty talk. I felt like a guest on The View.) After checking my pulses and examining my tongue, she concluded that my liver Qi, or life force, was my biggest problem. It was stagnant, and it explained a lot of what made me feel bad: my fatigue, my irritability, the panic attacks that a low dose of antianxiety meds has kept at bay for years. She could help me, she said. She could definitely help me.  She inserted eight needles into my body \u2014 one in either hand, one in either foot, two in my chest, one in my brow, and one in the top of my head \u2014 and left me alone in a dark room for twenty-two minutes. After the novelty of the circumstance subsided, I felt a strange tingling throughout my body that left me both relaxed and energized, and the acupuncturist later told me that the feeling would only grow stronger and last longer with weekly visits. Each of which, I learned, would cost $150. Stepping out into the blinding sunlight of a summer day, I felt better than good \u2014 I felt great. Until I realized that even if I had an extra $600 a month, I sure as hell wouldn&amp;#039;t spend it so I could lie in a dark room alone. The euphoria wore off after a day or so. I continue taking pills for anxiety.  I did other stuff, too. I read something beautiful \u2014 one of Paltrow&amp;#039;s favorite books, Paul Bowles&amp;#039;s The Sheltering Sky, which she says &amp;quot;very much set me straight at a very pivotal moment in my life.&amp;quot; I cleaned out my space and invested in what&amp;#039;s real by going through my closet and selling castoffs on eBay so I could donate the proceeds to charity. (In April, Paltrow auctioned off some of her clothes on eBay, with proceeds going to the Robin Hood Foundation. She presumably netted more than the $4.99 I got for my shirts.) And I constantly tried to keep my thoughts positive and constructive. At the end of this two-week experiment, I can report, without qualification or caveat, that I felt very, very good. I was sleeping better. I had more energy. I&amp;#039;d lost nine pounds. (People liked to remind me that this was all water weight and that I&amp;#039;d probably gain it all back, but that&amp;#039;s just noise to me.) Revolutionary or not, Gwyneth&amp;#039;s way worked, and if it worked for this sinner, it could work for anybody. Case closed. And yet. I wasn&amp;#039;t having much fun. (I like to eat red meat and drink too much at parties. It makes me happy.) I wasn&amp;#039;t doing well at work \u2014 maybe it&amp;#039;s because I was drinking less caffeine, but I was more reserved in meetings and a little slower on the uptake. I was also quite a bit poorer than when I started out. I came to realize that I couldn&amp;#039;t live the life I wanted to live while doing all the things Gwyneth Paltrow thought I should do. So for those reasons and a few more, I began slipping back to where I&amp;#039;d started. Now I try to eat more vegetables and spend a little more time in the gym, but I have neither the time nor the resources to commit myself full-time to feeling good. I have other things to do. Like going out to lunch.  To celebrate the end of my adventures in Paltrowdom, I went out with a few friends for fried chicken and beer and wound up in the fetal position afterward, ruing the assault on my newly sensitized stomach. I felt very bad indeed. But I can&amp;#039;t think of a better way to spend an afternoon. RELATED LINKS:  Paltrow&amp;#039;s Advice on How to Feel Good, from Common Sense to Madness  PLUS: Health Advice That Actually Works from Dr. Oz   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a6296/gwyneth-paltrow-diet-1009/>