Vegan Food & Living’s editor Holly Johnson spoke to Ella Mills, founder of the Deliciously Ella brand, on the Simply Veganpodcast recently. Find out why she changed her diet and how it impacted her world
Since starting her healthy food blog in 2012, Ella Mills has gone on to sell almost 1.5 million books worldwide as well as launching her own food ranges, restaurant and successful app. But it wasn’t a love of food that started this journey – it was, in fact, chronic illness.
One year earlier, Ella was studying at university when she suddenly became ill. “I had a condition that really looked like the kind of more extreme end of Long Covid. The easiest way to now summarise it for people, is that it was a dysfunctioning of my autonomic nervous system.”
She would sleep for 16-18 hours a day and experienced brain fog, pain and chronic infections. “I spent three and a half years on continuous antibiotics and I used to go into hospital for antibiotic drips,” she says. “I was having MRIs , endoscopy, colonoscopy, ultrasounds and swallowing cameras. I was taking about 20-25 different medications a day. No one said ‘This will definitely work’, but I had gone into it assuming it’d be kind of like having tonsillitis – you take antibiotics, you get better and then you’re fine.”
Finding a solution
Realising that nothing seemed to be helping, Ella started to do her own research. “I hit an absolute rock bottom with my physical health, but very much at that point, with my mental health too. I just had this moment of extraordinary hopelessness. And it was from that, that I realised I’m not going to live like this – there must be something else I can do.
“I started looking up alternative medicine, natural healing, and all these sorts of definitions. I found people all over the world, with all sorts of different conditions, who had changed their diet or lifestyle and were seeing huge, really profound impacts on their health… to the point where it had completely given them their life back.”
A fresh start
Feeling she had nothing to lose, but worried that she couldn’t cook, the entrepreneur embarked on overhauling her diet. “I very much assumed that healthy eating was going to feel like deprivation. I had very negative preconceptions in my head – that it would be bland and flavourless and all the rest of it.”
At the time, the term plant-based wasn’t really around, and vegan food meant swapping a meat sausage for a veg
