Ella Mills, aka Deliciously Ella, urges us to whip up sweet potato brownies and zucchini noodles with avocado cream, and to embrace the joys of nut butters and coconut oils, in our quest to #eatclean and achieve “better health, glowing skin and boundless energy”.
Bella Younger, aka Deliciously Stella, has a different approach for those who want to #gettheglow. Her breakfast smoothie features green food colouring and apple liqueur because “dyeing things green automatically makes them look healthy”. Her summery fruit salad is packed with foam bananas, gummy strawberries and sour cherries - “This fruit salad is so easy, it takes almost no effort to make” - and her raw vegan burger consists of a handful of coconut mushrooms and marshmallow fluff in a roll. Top tip: “If you put the word ‘raw’ in front of something, it automatically makes it healthy.”
The Deliciously Stella character was dreamed up by Younger last year while she was working in television, researching up-and-coming chefs. She came across the clean-eating phenomenon, headed by the likes of Mills, Alice Liveing, aka Clean Eating Alice, and the Hemsley sisters (#TheArtOfEatingWell, #GoodAndSimple). “I spent an afternoon on Instagram, looking at the hashtag eatclean – I couldn’t believe how many handstands there were, and how there could be so many avocados in the world,” she says. Her boss challenged her to start her own version, and she came back after the weekend with her Deliciously Stella parody, and 25 followers on Instagram.
Younger was also an aspiring comedian, and was writing a show for the Edinburgh festival at the time. (“It was called Champagne Socialist – about how I come from a Tory political dynasty, but I’m quite left wing, and how disgusted my family are with that, and how hard I tried to be cool and lefty, but I have a posh voice and everything went wrong.”) She had unexpectedly landed an hour-long slot, having only performed a handful of five-minute gigs before, and “was a bit worried no one would come and see it. I thought if I get [Deliciously Stella] on Facebook, maybe I won’t perform to an empty room.”
So she “spent a lot of time stalking people [on Instagram] and leaving cringy emojis – clean-eating people, famous people, people who used the same hashtags” to get them interested in Deliciously Stella, and eventually Davina McCall took note. McCall’s attention brought Deliciously Stella 1,000 followers; today she has 131,000 and a just-published book, in which she “shares the #cleaneating life hacks she swears by to achieve a #strongnotskinny look and a #blessed outlook on life”.
Whether this is “indulgent truffle strawghetti”, which substitutes strawberry laces for spaghetti (“arrange them into four piles in four bowls; you should aim for a swirl formation”), or avocado and eggs on toast three ways, using gummy, Creme or scotch eggs (“getting your eggs to look perfect can be tricky but once you know these easy life hacks you’ll never look back”), it’s a welcome parody of the ubiquitous clean-eating fanaticism.
“It’s everywhere – you can’t avoid it. And I just think a lot of it is rooted in bad science. I’m surprised people haven’t questioned it more. Everyone has rushed to give up gluten and I think it doesn’t make sense. I’ve got no problem with anyone who wants to eat more vegetables or exercise more, but it gets to an extreme and it’s so restrictive,” says Younger, 28, who has now given up her job in television to concentrate on comedy full time.
“I personally found it made me feel a bit rubbish about myself – it’s the unrealistic expectations put on women. That we can get up at six, work out for two hours, have a kale whatever, and then also manage to do a desk job. When you look at someone like Gisele, you know she looks that way because it’s her job. But for a normal person, you can’t eat and exercise like that and do everything else you need to do. And it’s incredibly expensive.
“I don’t mind the idea of spiralised vegetables, but replacing a complex carbohydrate with spiralised vegetables is madness. It’s not pasta, it’s not going to fill you up. Also cauliflower pizza is so depressing. Things like that make me a bit sad. How long is it since you ate a real pizza if you think a cauliflower pizza is delicious?”
