I Had Brain Fog And Put On 5kg

Gwyneth Paltrow opens up about lockdown woes and getting Covid

- Nici De Wet

SILKY hair, long slim limbs, washboard stomach, perfect pores, serene smile – all this and then some belong to the goddess of wellness, Gwyneth Paltrow.

Even those who love her sometimes have to agree she’s annoyingly perfect and ridiculously successful, having made a fortune peddling products as outlandish as candles that smell like her down-there bits and necklaces that double as sex toys.

So it’s safe to say there was a certain amount of Schadenfreude when she made the recent announcement that she’d put on weight in lockdown – and now that she’s in her late forties, she struggled to lose it too.

It wasn’t like the old days when you decided to drop a couple of kilos and – voila! – they’ve melted away, she said.

“I gained a lot of weight over Covid,” she admitted on the podcast The Art of Being Well, hosted by medical doctor and author Will Cole.

“I didn’t do my eating plan. I just was, like, having alcohol and pasta all the time and then I sort of hit a wall.”

Being in perimenopause didn’t help matters. “I’m 48 and I know that women tend to lose up to 30% of their metabolic speed once we enter this phase of life. So I know some of it is that.”

She put on around 5kg, she says – not a vast amount, of course, but enough for people to have a bit of an “ah, she’s just like us” moment.

But there was another confession Gwynnie made that would’ve garnered her only sympathy. She’s suffering from long Covid, she says, after contracting the virus last year and has been left with “serious brain fog” and fatigue.