Ep.34 "I Was Public Enemy Number 1" The Truth Behind The Media Storm With Deliciously Ella
Working Hard with Grace Beverley
sophie@grace-beverley.com
4.2 • 901 Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2023
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ella Mills is an award-winning author, entrepreneur and champion of plant based living. She was the founder of Deliciously Ella in 2012, a plant-based food & wellness platform sharing delicious ways to feel better. Although it originated as a recipe website, Ella Mills has developed the business into a restaurant, a range of plant based food products, an app, a podcast and a collection of best-selling recipe books.
Prior to starting Delicious Ella in 2011, Ella was diagnosed with postural tachycardia syndrome as well as ehlers-danlos and mast cell activation disorder, which followed four months in and out of hospital. The condition affected Ella’s autonomic nervous system and also meant she struggled with digestive issues, chronic fatigue, a series of infections and a whole host of other symptoms. After being prescribed a cocktail of medication that had no effect Ella hit rock bottom, both physically and mentally.
It was at this point that Ella looked into other ways of managing her condition and turned to whole foods, a plant-based diet, and overhauled her lifestyle.
Deliciously Ella has become a leader in the plant-based space. Together with her husband and Deliciously Ella CEO, they’ve published six best-selling cookbooks, including the fast-selling vegan cookbook ever; a lifestyle app with recipes, workouts and meditations; a central London cafe and several ranges of food products in over 7,000 stores across the UK, with customers ranging from Tesco to Boots, Waitrose and Costa.
- the early life of Ella Mills
- how Ella knew something was wrong with her health
- the symptoms she developed
- how her illness affected her physical and mental health
- how Ella's illness changed her university experience
- what caused Ella's lifestyle change
- the start of Deliciously Ella
- the media's response to plant based eating
- would Ella have been treated by the press differently if she was a man?
- dealing with judgement
- how Ella met her husband and moved in after a week
- Ella's mindset over her 8 year career
- how Ella evolved Deliciously Ella
- Ella's experience opening her first restaurant
- Ella closing her restaurant and the media storm it ensued
- the affects of the media storm on her employees
- Ella's biggest learnings
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Transcript
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| 0:32.1 | I do think I ever would have had criticism if what I had done was like a baking cookbook. |
| 0:38.3 | We closed the central kitchen and the teeny, teeny site that we opened. |
| 0:42.3 | The story of closing them was that we were going out of business. |
| 0:45.3 | Every kind of media outlet had some sort of piece on like why I was the worst person on earth. |
| 0:51.3 | The whole narrative was a real criticism of healthy eating. |
| 0:56.0 | But he did feel as a kind of public enemy number one. |
| 0:59.0 | They certainly didn't have the confidence to fight back. |
| 1:03.0 | It was really brutal. |
| 1:06.0 | Telling someone that the way they're dealing with a chronic illness is wrong |
| 1:09.0 | is deeply problematic. No one would have not taken a man's chronic illness seriously and would have told them that they were doing something wrong in response to it. |
| 1:17.6 | Strangely, it was this episode of Working Hard Hardly Working. |
| 1:37.2 | Today I'm talking to none other than The Deliciously Ella, the starter of all things. |
| 1:42.5 | Instagram, food, plant-based movement, everything back in the early |
| 1:45.9 | 2010s. Let me tell you, I was obsessed when she originally started and I've followed her journey |
| 1:52.0 | since then. And I think she has a really, really, really, really, really interesting story. |
| 1:56.5 | We delve into a lot of it in today's episode. We talk about everything from her original diagnosis, |
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