JOOP: Your Guide To Not Feeling Bad About Relaxing And Enjoying Life

Celebrity lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow recently broke down and went through "a majorly fun and delicious 'relax and enjoy life phase' about a month ago." To compensate for enjoying life, Gwyneth believes you should DO a detox program. I disagree!

The Movieline crew disagrees as well, going so far as to offer Gwyneth an intervention against her own detoxification and exercise obsession. However, I think the best way to counteract Ms. Paltrow's pile o'GOOP is to create our own pile of JOOP, don't you? Below, your JOOP Guide To Not Feeling Bad About Relaxing And Enjoying Life. Excelsior!!!

• DO: Not listen to this bullshit, please. If you have to spend a month of your life "detoxing" from a period of relaxation and enjoyment, then you might want to start reconsidering your priorities. Life is short. Going through a constant cycle of being "relaxed" and being "disciplined" is a set up for unhealthy attitudes towards everything from food to exercise to body image to self-esteem. Happiness is not something that you need to wash away, and you're not "cleaner" after dropping a few pounds of water weight from your colon. As Kyle at Movieline notes:"You've got millions in Coldplay money and A View from the Top residuals, you act a few weeks a year on an Iron Man movie, and you WORK OUT THREE HOURS A DAY. If you need to assign yourself a "relax and enjoy life" phase, then you are messing up life things." If there's one thing we all need to detox from, it's the idea that losing a few pounds is the key to "fixing" our "bad" spells of, you know, living happily.

• MAKE: Cake. Or pie, if you must. But preferably cake. And then eat it. And then stop worrying about it. Cake is a part of a balanced diet, man. I'm not saying you should eat cake three meals a day, but the sooner people stop assigning "bad" and "good" to foods and start incorporating a variety of treats into a healthy, balanced meal plan, the better we'll all be. And the less likely we'll be to fall for stupid "this is my naughty phase, this is my detox phase" advice from the likes of Paltrow.

• GET: A unicorn. I like to buy my unicorns from an exclusive unicorn dealer on Saturn, but you can probably find one at your local unicorn dealership. A unicorn, if you didn't know, eats bullshit for breakfast and shits out rainbows, which is really handy if you have a stack of printed GOOP newsletters in the corner of your room and you need a little color in your day.

• BE: Happy. Really. Life is too short, you guys. I say this as someone who spent 7 years that I can't get back trapped in eating disorder hell, buying into similar crap notions that I could "fix" myself by going through a cycle of "relaxing" and fasting and so on. What works for a millionaire actress with a bevy of personal trainers and elite doctors and nutritionists may just be a disaster for you. And if you ever have to feel bad about enjoying life, then ur doin' it wrong.

• SEE: A registered dietician, if you really want to change your eating habits. Fasts and detoxes are temporary fixes that don't encourage a healthy way of eating or a healthy attitude towards food. A good dietician will help you incorporate REAL foods into your meal plan (one can not life on juice fasts and frozen diet dinners alone) to create a realistic way of staying healthy and happy.

• GO:Relax and enjoy life. Nobody should ever have to apologize or compensate for having fun and being happy. GOOP may want you to "nourish the inner aspect," but what kind of "nourishment" springs from trying to wash your "fun" times away? Perhaps if we really concentrated on the "inner aspect," we'd see that we're worth a whole lot more than a few lousy pounds. I know I'd rather walk around with a body filled with cake and happy memories than a body filled with a steaming pile of GOOP.

Gwyneth Paltrow: The Movieline Intervention [Movieline]