Beauty Blog » Time To Detox The Bod: Do It Gwyneth Paltrow-Style

I have a celebrity girl-crush: the very lovely and stately Ms. Paltrow. I don’t know when exactly she won me over. Maybe it was when she played the bored, troubled Margot Helen Tenenbaum or the impassioned Viola DeLesseps in “Shakespeare in Love”. Her freshly scrubbed girl next door looks and elegance constantly appeals to me. Pair that with Chris Martin as the hub and a baby girl named Apple and you have a covetable life. And her mom is GORGEOUS. I mean, WOW. I hope I look like that at 60.

Plus, did all of you catch her with Mario Batali on PBS when they ate their way through Spain? I thought it was entirely charming when she would call Mario “Batalls” and remark drolly while they were in fresh oyster beds: ” You just need to put some cocktail sauce on that and you’ll be in biz.” Ok, maybe abbreviating words is annoying to some but I think it’s, well, FAB.

So imagine my surprise at finding that Ms. Paltrow has a BLOG. Did y’all know about this? It is chock full of recipes, fashion tips, things to see, acquire and know. Little icons open into pages with her thoughts and suggestions. And recently, I was really glad to see her write about detoxing. I know how she eats macrobiotically and organically but detoxing is a whole other level of cleaning your body that I am also interested in learning. Especially after the holidays.

For a while there, I was considering doing the Master Cleanse which required one to drink gallons of water, lemon, cayenne pepper and maple syrup for a week. Also a mild laxative herbal tea at night and salted water in the morning. You drop weight quickly and it also teaches you to wean your body back to eating solid foods. Beyonce was on this diet for her movie Dreamgirls. I considered it but decided it was a bit too extreme. I do admire people who have survived it (there are lots of video testimonials on Youtube) and consider their will steelier than mine. How do they do it?

I’ve done a herbal cleanse with tea and have seen the benefits: Beautiful clear skin, mental clarity and less physical bloat. It’s awesome. I only do it occasionally because your body will lose nutrients, minerals and electrolytes. But I’m kind of ready for something in between a diet and a fast. I think I will give Gwyneth’s detox diet a go. She consulted a dietician named Dr. Alejandro Junger who is coming out with a book called Cleanse. The 7 day diet is heavy on juices (vegetable and fruit)the first 3 days and it slowly introduces solid food like steamed salmon and greens later on in the detox. She includes helpful recipes (like teriyaki detox chicken) and suggests sauna/steam rooms to aid in drawing out toxins (going to the gym to sweat works as well) and taking olive oil at night or a mild laxative to aid in the removal process.

So I’m going to give it a go. What about you guys? Have you ever done a detox?