The rise and fall and rise of Deliciously Ella

Last week, Deliciously Ella founder Ella Mills wrote a very powerful piece for Grazia.

In it, she describes feelings of ‘self-hatred and sense of failure’ coupled with ‘rock-bottom self-esteem’, which peaked with intrusive thoughts after the birth of her daughter.

Some of you might be thinking, ‘Wait, are we talking about the beautiful woman with the picture-perfect family and health food empire? What on earth does she have to feel bad about?’ (And I know people think this, because they have said it to me in the past week.) 

This got me thinking about how the story of Deliciously Ella perfectly encapsulates a problem with how we treat women in the public-facing part of the wellness world.

Just over a decade ago, Ella Mills was a student and had been diagnosed with a condition called postural tachycardia syndrome, a nervous system abnormality that meant she couldn’t control her heart rate and blood pressure. She was prescribed a cocktail of medications, with limited success, and sank into depression.

‘For me, it showed up as extreme apathy,’ she writes in the Grazia piece. ‘I felt nothing. Nothing at being told I had a chronic illness and may likely never recover. Nothing at sitting for hours, day after day, totally alone. Nothing at my whole life unravelling. In retrospect, I wonder if that almost catatonic state was my way of protecting myself from the reality of where I was.’

The reason that she became so evangelical about a whole food, plant-based diet is because it was this (along with overhauling her lifestyle in other ways) that eventually cured her of all the symptoms of a supposedly-chronic condition. Who can blame her for wanting to tell everyone about it?

She realised something that I wish I had known at 21: healthy food doesn’t have to be joyless. It can be flavoursome, nourishing, moreish. The clue is in the name. Deliciously Ella became a huge success, bringing an army of fans, but also some very vocal haters.

Ella was touted as a figurehead of the ‘clean eating’ movement (a term she never used), and accused of inciting eating disorders. Newspaper headlines gleefully reported that two of her delis had to close due to financial issues. There was even a spoof Instagram account @DeliciouslyStella, which made fun of her, substituting green juice for white wine, and captioning a Dairy Milk #breakfastofchampions.

Here was a woman in her early twenties, being openly mocked and bullied. It brings to mind a few other examples of young women who were thrown to the wolves in a similar way, and are now being reevaluated in light of changing attitudes.

This societal reassessment has made us all think back to how we gossiped idly about Amy Winehouse’s addictions, Caroline Flack’s love life, Pamela Anderson’s sex tape and poor old Britney Spears performing to make money for her controlling father.

Those are all clear-cut cases of the press and public treating women unfairly, and sometimes cruelly. But we don’t seem to have reassessed the treatment of Ella Mills in the same way.

Perhaps she looks too healthy and together to be considered one of those cases. Perhaps she’s too posh. Perhaps she doesn’t show enough of her messy, ‘authentic’ bad days on Instagram. Perhaps she should complain about her husband or kids more, then people would find her more ‘relatable’.

Is the vitriol sexist? I believe so.

I know we can’t say a bad word about Our Patron Saint of Lockdown Joe Wicks (and like everyone, I do love him). But his entire brand was initially built on body transformations, before-and-after pictures and (whisper it) weight loss. I know this because I signed up for the Joe Wicks programme in 2017 after my daughter was born - and I can tell you that private Facebook group was aaaaaall about weight loss chat. 

Which is fine! People can lose weight if they want to. Now Joe has rebranded and is all about working out for your mental health, which is also fine.

My point is that Ella’s thing was never about weight loss. It was about eating delicious food to feel well. Yet she faced criticism that would never have been levelled at Joe Wicks.

Now, I may not be on board with plant-based ‘chocolate’ (sorry vegans, it really isn’t as nice). But I honestly don’t see how you can possibly argue with the main thrust of Ella’s message: that eating more plants is great for your health - so let’s make it as delicious as possible. 

As someone who has also been through a life-changing diagnosis, and is now very motivated to live as healthily as I can, I’m certainly glad that she found a way to power through the mean-spirited criticism and keep going. 

Her most recent book is excellent, and so is her podcast, and I still subscribe to her app. I am very much on Team Ella.

This week I’m… 

• Already planning my Friday night in with romcom royalty in Your Place or Mine 

• Loving these beautiful Scamp & Dude scarves, designed to support their campaign to gift a scarf to every woman starting chemo in the UK

• Very into how much fun Lizzo and Adele were having at the Grammys

• Still obsessed with my HRV