Here’s what the 47-year-old Goop founder and actress had to share with the mag…

On her childhood: “There wasn’t a lot of Wellness in the house. My mother was environmentally conscious. She helped pioneer curbside recycling in Santa Monica, and we were the house that had the Hansen’s natural soda.”

On how the treatment of her father’s throat cancer, in 1999, prompted her journey to wellness: “His treatment was so brutal, I was thinking, almost out of desperation, that we had to be able to do something else to help him. That’s when I started to research food and nutrition.”

On her mission with wellness: “I really believe that being alive is just a process of—if you’re not wasting your fucking life — figuring out how you can impact the world positively. You can choose to engage in your life and participate in it, or you can back out and criticize everybody else in your arena.”

On the double standards of being an actress and business mogul: “I don’t want to unnecessarily move myself from one box to another one. In this society we like our women in one digestible way that we understand, but if you try to be something else, we don’t like it. People couldn’t for a long time believe that I was running a company, until they heard me say, ‘I’m giving up acting. I’ll never be onscreen again.’”

For more from Gwyneth, visit TownandCountryMag.com.