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When we mere mortals feel faint and off-kilter and fear we’re having a major health emergency, and really we’ve just gotten too much sun or had too little to eat, we file away our crazy little moment among our embarrassing stories shared only with close friends and family.
But when Gwyneth Paltrow has such an episode, she writes a cookbook. Her latest tome, “It’s All Good,” begins with the actress-turned-lifestyle guru’s harrowing tale.
“One sunny afternoon in London, in the spring of 2011, I thought — without sounding overly dramatic — that I was going to die,” she writes. “I had just served lunch in the garden at home . . . I had a vague feeling that I was going to faint, and I wasn’t forming thoughts correctly . . . I got a searing pain in my head, I couldn’t speak, and I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was having a stroke.”
Turns out, it was a migraine and a panic attack.
In the book, out April 2, Paltrow offers recipes for and insights into the strict miracle diet that her doctor put her on for three weeks to “clear out [her] system, heal [her] gut and revive her [body].”
Among the diet’s forbidden foods: coffee, eggs, sugar, shellfish, deepwater fish, potatoes, tomatoes, bell pepper, eggplant, corn, wheat and meat.
The prescription was, she writes, “tough words for a foodie to hear.”
Paltrow has been pushing herself as a “foodie” for years. In 2007, she took a culinary tour of Spain with Mario Batali while refusing to eat the pork for which the country is known. The following year, she launched Goop,
her embarrassingly un-self-conscious lifestyle Web site.
Despite rampant mockery, she’s persisted with the site, offering up recipes, sharing her favorite $600 chef’s knives and even adding an e-commerce component to hawk Goop exclusive clothing and accessories.
And now, with her second cookbook, she is once again promoting herself as a foodie and a health guru, despite a weird obsession that treats eating with a greater sense of restriction than relish.
The book reads like the manifesto to some sort of creepy healthy-girl sorority with members who use beet juice rather than permanent marker to circle the “problem areas” on each other’s bodies. “Mealtimes should always feel happy. Not like a punishment,” Paltrow assures us in the introduction, leaving us to wonder just what dinnertime torture she’s previously endured.
She recounts how “lots of french fries and wine” were in part to blame for her health issues, but it’s hard to imagine the Waspy poster girl for self-restraint actually overindulging, especially after she notes that she was also “severely anemic” and “vitamin D deficient” — ailments more common to those who don’t indulge enough. This is, after all, a woman who recently told Redbook magazine that her “favorite thing” was kicking off the New Year with a three-week detox diet.
Paltrow, the “foodie,” appears deeply conflicted about her food-loving ways, and it seems like she’s not quite honest with both her audience and herself. On one page, she’s going on about her love for Parmesan and pasta, on the next, she notes that after being tested, it turns out that “everyone in my house is intolerant of gluten, dairy, chickens’ eggs, among many other surprising foods.” Thankfully, there’s Vegenaise, a vegan mayonnaise substitute she and co-author Julia Turshen “can’t live without” and even advocate using in the family brownie recipe.
Many recipes allow more ingredients than the ultra-restrictive elimination diet that cured Paltrow (and that she begins her year with), but nearly all eschew gluten, sugar and cow’s milk — though “occasionally you’ll see recipes that call for plain, full-fat sheep’s or goat’s milk yogurt,” which is “way more digestible and less allergenic than cow’s milk varieties.”
While there are, of course, many who are legitimately allergic to dairy and gluten, it’s hard to know what to make of her family’s sensitivities. Her cred as a health guru is as sketchy as her foodie-ism, especially given the numerous health-trend trains she’s ridden over the years, from a macrobiotic diet to cupping acupuncture. In 2010, she featured Organic Avenue on Goop, enthusing about the “amazing results” she’d achieved with a five-day juice cleanse. Earlier this year, she and her fitness guru, Tracy Anderson, were featured in a Redbook magazine cover story, with Anderson warning that “juice fasting destroys your metabolic rate” and is “not what detoxification is about.”
The intro to the “grains” chapter notes, with great specificity, that “every single nutritionist, doctor and health-conscious person I have ever come across . . . seems to concur that [gluten] is tough on the system and many of us are at best intolerant of it and at worst allergic to it.”
When she goes on to write that “sometimes when my family is not eating pasta, bread or processed grains like white rice, we’re left with that specific hunger that comes with avoiding carbs,” it’s hard not to feel a bit concerned for her daughter, Apple, 8, and son Moses, 6.
Photos of what appear to be her children are featured throughout the book — offering a rare glimpse of Paltrow’s family, and, it seems, an attempt to position herself as a sort of everywoman, though, as the jacket cover admits, when it comes to looking like Gwynnie, it’s not just diet (and money), “some of it is genes.”
On the front cover, Paltrow goes to comical lengths to look relatable. She smiles toothily in front of rustic wooden crates piled with zucchini. Her blond hair is tousled and scraggly, her dark roots clearly visible. She wears little makeup, and her skin walks a precarious line between glowing and shiny.
In the pictures inside, she looks far more comfortable in pastoral art photos in which she’s gathering vegetables in a fetching ethnic print dress and Hunter boots than she does actually cooking and touching a raw chicken.
There seems to be no end to Paltrow’s food obsessions — and her broadcasting them to the world. She’s reportedly bored with acting and wants to focus on expanding her lifestyle brand. The only film she’s starring in this year is “Iron Man 3,” in which the Oscar winner again tackles the meaty role of Pepper Potts, Tony Stark’s secretary and love interest.
Her rep has said she won’t give up acting altogether, though, and will “do one, maybe two supporting parts a year.”
She might, however, make time for a food-related starring role. Paltrow has been in talks to play Prune chef Gabrielle Hamilton in a film adaptation of Hamilton’s raw memoir, “Blood, Bones & Butter.”
Given that Hamilton is a scrappy, petite rebel and Paltrow is a 5-foot-9 patrician beauty, it seems like a logical role for her to take on — so long as no butter is involved in the actual filming.
heber@nypost.com