Getting in shape for any movie is hard. But the preparation for Iron Man 2 undertaken by Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr. was like a NASA experiment. Gwyneth ate only Kale; Robert hit truck tires with a sledgehammer.

Make-believe celebrity fitness expert and former Madonna-thinner Tracy Anderson helped Gwyenth Paltrow burn off all those ice creams and fried foods with a highly-performance diet of air and water plus a couple leaves of kale thrown in. Here is what she ate, which she detailed on her website (NSFW if your work doesn't allow websites with fuscia backgrounds).

For breakfast, she had a shake of almond milk and blueberries with some sort of magic powder in it that makes your hair lustrous and your body sharp and angular, like a knife; Post work-out: kale juice; lunch: low-carb wrap with almond butter and chopped dates OR, she "came up with this recipe" that is taking a skinless chicken breast and grilling it with olive oil; dinner: turkey kale soup.

And then she did this weird foot maneuver for 90 minutes each day:

So, that seems like a special form of torture dreamed up by a group of militant vegan revolutionaries to extract information from prisoners. Or Tracy Anderson, who recently put Jennifer Anderson on a baby food diet.

Meanwhile, Robert Downey Jr.'s trainer apparently learned his craft from a 1920s strong man on Coney Island, because these are some of the exercises he made him do, as detailed in Web-MD:

  • FIRE HOSES: "I filled fire hoses with sand and water – one of each – and got [Downey] to whip them around. He would do almost squats while whipping the fire hoses up and down," Bose says.
  • TRUCK TIRES AND SLEDGEHAMMER: Bose bought giant truck tires and had Downey beat the tires with sledgehammer "like you'd beat a drum. Then we'd swing them overhead and pound the tires. That builds shoulder stability," Bose says.
  • SUV TIRES: Downey flipped and threw SUV tires like a discus. "Again, this is pretty advanced stuff," Bose says. "It's not like the average person should do this, because it puts a lot of torque on the spine... You get very powerful in your abs."
  • MIDGET LIFTS: Kidding!

For Iron Man 3 Gwyneth is going to nourish herself only with sun and salt-licks, and Robert is going to fight a three-headed dragon every day for three hours.

[Photo via Getty Images]