Trading God for Goop: The pitfalls

Elise Loehen and Gwyneth Paltrow Source

Those who put aside religion often trade God for Goop. The evidence makes clear that both the wellness environment, as with the mindfulness industry - see here - takes a person away from a proven religious tradition and sends them along a path bedevilled by many dangers with regards physical and psychic health.

The latest such person to sound the alarm is no less than Goop's former chief content officer, Elise Loehen, who made multiple appearances on the Netflix series The Goop Lab and co-hosted the Goop podcast with company founder Gwyneth Paltrow. Loehen has earned Paltrow's praise for helping transform what started in 2008 as a newsletter into a prominent lifestyle brand.  

The Independent reports:  

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”.

Loehen also raises the matter of how the "wellness culture can be toxic", given the emphasis on body weight, or in eating only those foods someone has declared "correct". She said on Instagram:

I needed to break a tendency to be critical and punishing. To chastise myself. All of it. I stopped weighing myself completely. [...] 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.

I've come to realise I really like my body and am grateful it is mine. 

It's great that Loehen has broken free from the harmful mentality of Goop's consumer-oriented business which vigorously uses Paltrow's celebrity status to promote the latest food fads and its ever-expanding list of "must-have" products.

In addition, a harmful mentality is seen on Goop's corporate front. The Independent states:

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.

 To investigate the wellness space more generally, we get this kind of picture:

There is a type of “all-natural” Instagram influencer who, at first glance, appears to be all about living her best, healthy life. She is an avid proponent of meditation, clean eating, yoga, and a vague form of Asian spirituality. Her approach to life — and health — is “holistic.” And her social media feeds are a whiplash of content, ranging from the benefits of gua sha and ayurvedic diets to her skepticism about the effectiveness of masks and vaccines.

Over the past year of the pandemic, the wellness space [...] has grown rife with politically motivated misinformation on QAnon, Covid-19, the prevalence of child trafficking, and election integrity.

Media coverage has largely centered on these New Age-type influencers as peddlers of a libertarian, anti-science ideology that refuses masks, social distancing, and vaccines. “California’s yoga, wellness and spirituality community has a QAnon problem,” read a recent Los Angeles Times headline. “Wellness influencers are spreading QAnon conspiracies about the coronavirus,” declared Mother Jones. In March, the Washington Post wrote about “QAnon’s unexpected roots in New Age spirituality”.

The conclusion is this:

These articles explore a concerning facet of American life, a phenomenon researchers call conspirituality, or how conspiracy theories have found a home in spiritual circles that are skeptical of Western medicine and established institutions. The observations stop short of implying that certain practices, like yoga, are a direct pathway to radicalization. Blame is generally assigned to the wellness communities where these fringe, anti-science ideas comfortably fester. Still, while most coverage identifies the prevalence of these dangerous, unfounded beliefs accurately, there is often little context on the wellness space’s relationship with Orientalism (or the West’s tendency to romanticize, stereotype, and flatten Asian cultures) and libertarian individualism.

For decades, many health and medicinal practices have been exported from Asia to the West, including yoga, ayurveda, reiki, and aspects of traditional Chinese medicine such as cupping, gua sha, and acupuncture. Such traditions are often categorized under the “alternative medicine” or “New Age” umbrella — vague terms that conflate different philosophical and medical systems into a uniquely Western mishmash of ideas. 

This "mishmash of ideas", regularly the next port of call for those who abandon traditional institutions, includes alternative medicine. One observer of that domain last year found that:

[T]he gurus of “alternative health” are having a good pandemic, informational chaos and legitimacy crises bolstering their positions. YouTube brims with them: thin, tanned, toothy juicers who mix boring, sensible advice like “get enough sleep”, with sexily counterintuitive emerging wisdom like “fat doesn’t make you fat”, then each throw in their own twist: normally something involving curcumin, infra-red light, and the healing power of beef tallow.

That observer wondered why wellness gurus become Covid dissidents; and found that: The world of alternative health was already primed to question the medical establishment.

Other elements of the rebellion against traditional institutions are that:

... "the so-called pandemic has been little more than a casus belli for a broader system of global control that aims to create a common international identification system, to puppet ordinary folk towards the vague ends of Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates and various other plutocrats. A theory often known as The Great Reset." 

The difficulty in this particular domain is that dissidents can fly free, dismissing moral/ethical boundaries that society expects of its leaders. Therefore:

There are a range of questions that medicine, with its careful studies, cannot yet answer. Outsiders, in informal structures, can make the links quicker, and offer rules of thumb without worrying about clear cause and effect. 

All of these conditions are part of the world that greedily absorbs many institutional dissidents, especially those who have rejected their religious heritage for freedom, as they think, to do and be what they want, even if it impacts negatively on the common good through a breakdown of their own well-being.

In this light, the pervading individualistic character of Western society that gives rise to the dissident "wellness" and "Alt-whatever" environment, is clearly having a serious effect on the well-being of young people. To take one statistic, that relating to the number of people reporting a sexual/gender identity at odds with the norm, we find a match between that number and the gradual-then-swift rejection of traditional spiritual institutions and the morality they teach. 

The health care organization, HealthPartners, gives these statistics for LGBTQ mental health:

People in the LGBTQ community experience mental health issues at higher rates. A recent study found 61% have depression, 45% have PTSD and 36% have an anxiety disorder.

Additionally, 40 percent of transgender individuals have attempted suicide in their lifetime. This is nearly 9 times the overall rate in the United States.

Stigma certainly contributes to those disturbing statistics, but they show that the culturally promoted gay lifestyle, and more worryingly, the notion pushed even at elementary school level that trans is normal, is already having an impact on the overall well-being of society.

Without the traditional religious institutions to be our ship over troubled waters, we end up with the wellness space turning toxic, with anti-science proclamations harassing the health field, and with a fraudulent "conspirituality" that bedevils the world of mindfulness and the like. 

The solution: Stay on board, and do your exploring where history has shown that your adventure will be rewarded with unimaginable treasure, and with a relationship that endures for eternity.   

💢 Also, read carefully the information on how society permits the grooming of kids 

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