The 23 Year Old Blogger With A Twist: How Deliciously Ella Could Change Your Life

For those of you occupying another planet for the past twelve months, let me introduce you to Ella Woodward. If ever there was a poster girl for eating well, it’s the 23-year-old blogging sensation.

The woman excudes health. Slender, but not skinny, with glossy, caramel-y everything, she radiates superfood in a way Gwyneth Paltrow would give her right arm for.

It’s unsurprising then, that her food blog, Deliciously Ella, has become a global phenomenon in just three short years. The site receives 2.5 million hits a month, and Ella’s recipe app shot to number one in the food and drinks category on iTunes when it launched last year.

Her new cookbook, also Deliciously Ella, has just been released and includes 100 delicious new sugar-, gluten- and dairy-free recipes.

How Did Ella Get Delicious?

Ella was a student at St Andrew’s University when she was diagnosed in 2011 with postural tachycardia syndrome (PoTS). The rare autoimmune disease left her in chronic pain, sleeping for 16 hours a day and suffering from heart palpitations.

After months of tests, she was put on steroids, but saw little improvement, so decided to take her health into her own hands. Inspired by US author and wellbeing activist Kris Carr, who turned to nutrition to manage her stage-four cancer, Ella overhauled her diet, eliminating meat, dairy, sugar and processed foods.

It wasn’t an easy transition for the self-confessed ‘sugar monster’, who had never cooked before.

“When I first started this way of eating, I found it so hard,” Ella confesses. “I used to have dreams of coming downstairs and raiding my flatmate’s cupboard for Haribo. It took about three months for my tastebuds and mind to adjust.”

But adjust they did – Ella admits to feeling ‘amazing these days’. Like Carr, she hasn’t cured her condition, but claims to be ‘in remission’.

“My doctors have never had someone with my illness get better like this before. They’ve now agreed that I was right in taking a holistic approach to my diet. PoTS is an illness related to your histamine levels, which is connected to what you eat.

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Eat Well, Don’t Diet

To the uninitiated, Ella’s regime can seem draconian, and it’s true that, in order to keep her symptoms at bay, she sticks to a strictly plant-based diet and rarely drinks alcohol. But the blogger says she no longer wants to eat unhealthily.

“My mindset has completely changed,” she explains. “I still have cravings, but if I fancy something sweet or need comfort food, I’ll make a batch of my sweet potato brownies and eat almost the whole tray. I never feel deprived. Eating well isn’t meant to feel like a diet.”

The beauty of the Ella approach is its flexibility. Unlike other proponents of optimum nutrition, Ella isn’t evangelical about adopting a vegan diet.

"I personally hate the word vegan. My aim is to get people excited about vegetables, but you should adapt the recipes to suit your lifestyle. So add some feta to my beetroot risotto or have a glass of wine with your steak. Just don’t make meat the focus of every meal. Too often, we see veg as a side dish.

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Getting excited about vegetables is all very well, but how feasible is Ella’s lifestyle for the time-starved career woman or mother? Do her recipes require tricky-to-find ingredients, multiple gadgets and a whole lot of cleaning up? Surprisingly, no.

Having tried and tested numerous dishes on the Deliciously Ella blog, I can confirm they’re as easy as raw banoffee pie (one of Ella’s favourite creations). Her hugely popular raw chocolate brownies, for example, take less than ten minutes to make and contain just four energy-boosting ingredients: medjool dates, pecans, 100% maple syrup and raw cacao powder. They’re so good, I’ve taken to freezing them to stop myself scoffing the lot in one go.

Counting dates among her dessert-island (geddit?) must-haves, Ella’s stance on natural sugars is refreshingly relaxed.

“I’m not advocating drinking a bottle of maple syrup a day, but if a spoonful on your porridge means you love your oats and you’re not filling up on biscuits later on, I have no problem with that. If the worst thing you’re doing in life is eating fruit and honey then you’re winning.”

Now that’s a food philosophy we can all get on board with.

Deliciously Ella by Ella Woodward is published by Yellow Kite, and is out now, £20 ©Ella Woodward 2015.

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