Gwyneth Palrow is taking her commitment to promoting obsessive physical fitness to a dangerous new level. While she used to be happy just shoving her GOOP in our faces, now she’s planning on helping her equally obsessive trainer Tracy Anderson – who also trains Madonna – open a gym in New York City.

Gwyneth Paltrow helped her trainer Tracy Anderson find a studio space on Greenwich Street so that you too can have a body like hers—and Madonna’s. (Anderson has lived and traveled with the buff pop star for the last two years, keeping her in shape.) “Gwyneth came to see every space, engaged in detailed discussion after each one,” says their broker, Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Anita Grossberg. Anderson’s workout combines dance aerobics and Pilates. “When you walk into the studio it looks like a circus—bands and cubes and props are hanging from the ceiling,” Anderson said from South America, where she’s on the road with Madonna. “When I started training Gwyneth, she couldn’t dance at all, and now you should see her.”

[From New York Magazine]

Tracy Anderson also has a studio in Los Angeles – which customers say is poorly maintained with filthy bathrooms. Anderson is not only a crazy trainer, but a terrible, scamming “businesswoman” too. She shafted hundreds of customers out of money for their pre-paid training fees in Fischers, Indiana.

“I was a client of Tracy Anderson Studios in Fishers also. Her program does work, but don’t believe everything that you hear about Tracy and her business. It is true that she did leave her clients in Fishers overnight…just took the machines and our money and left. She claims to have been a student at the Julliard School of Dance, but come to find out she was there for only 3 months and then left.”

[From Gabsmash]

Anderson also claimed she’d create personalized pilates regimens for different body types, which her customers paid for. It turns out the regimens were actually the same for everyone. In addition to the Julliard claims, Tracy also said she was in Cats and was Power Ranger, which was false. Ton of her jilted former clients have posted on Gabsmash’s forums complaining about her, and they all have a similar story to tell. I can only imagine what kind of trouble the woman plans to get into in New York.

In April Us Weekly did an article about Anderson, which included her diet recommendations. Many of the meal plans had a total of less than 800 calories a day, which is definitely dangerous. In addition, Anderson also recommended working out for two hours a day, six days a week. Yet Gwyneth is still a devotee. In her latest GOOP email, she says she used to have a “Shar-Pei-like stomach” until she met Tracy, who apparently changed her life.

Tracy Anderson is a scammer promoting an utterly insane, unhealthy, extreme, and unbalanced lifestyle. The thought of this woman launching another gym is terrifying. I can just see women fainting en masse. Who can safely survive on a lunch of two hardboiled eggs, ½ a cup of baby carrots and ½ a cup of cherry tomatoes? All we can do is hope this is just a pipe dream on Gwyneth and Tracy’s part – though something tells me it isn’t.

Update: Thanks to editor David Zivian at Indianapolis Monthly for commenting with a link to this excellent profile of Tracy Anderson and her questionable business practices. She has a habit of not paying her bills or rent and regularly left businesses in the lurch owing money. Anderson has been sued six times in Indiana. What’s more is that she left her husband for a married guy she also owed tens of thousands to and then scammed that guy into investing even more money into her business, only to leave him once she hit it big.

Here are Gwyneth and Madonna on their way back from workouts with Tracy Anderson this past spring. Images thanks to Fame and Bauer-Griffin.