Deliciously Ella reveals how she healed her chronic illness with a plant-based diet

Discover how Ella Mills, founder of Deliciously Ella, turned her health around with plants and went on to run a business empire

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, a chronic illness.

In this exclusive interview, Vegan Food & Living’s editor Holly Johnson spoke to Ella Mills, founder of the Deliciously Ella brand, on the Simply Vegan podcast, and they delved into Ella’s journey to health, how she grew her brand and her new book, Healthy Made Simple.

Deliciously Ella: How it all started

In 2011, Ella was studying at university when she suddenly became really unwell. She would sleep for 16 to 18 hours a day and experienced brain fog, pain and chronic infections.

“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 it was a dysfunctioning of my autonomic nervous system,” she tells us.

“I spent three and a half years on continuous antibiotics and I used to go into hospital for antibiotic drips,” she continues.

“I was having MRIs and endoscopy and colonoscopy and ultrasounds and swallowing cameras. I was taking about 20 to 25 different medications a day. No one said ‘Oh, this will definitely work,’ but I had gone into it assuming it’d be kind of like having tonsillitis. I thought you take antibiotics and you just get better and then that’s 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.”

It was then that Ella started researching alternative medicine and natural healing. “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.”

Healing with plants

Feeling she had nothing to lose but concerned 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 vegan meat alternative.

Noticing a real lack of healthy, unprocessed vegan recipes for those wanting to ditch animal products, the Deliciously Ella blog was born.

“It wasn’t until I started the blog and started teaching myself how to cook that I suddenly realised I loved cooking.

Ella’s mum changed her diet to support her and noticed she felt better than ever. This trickled down through her family and friends, with many of them also ditching meat and dairy.

“I got to the end of uni and my health was starting to improve. And I was becoming so passionate about teaching people that plant-based food could be delicious. People started asking ‘can you teach me how to do that, would you do cooking classes and workshops and stuff for clubs?’. So that’s what I started doing when I left.”

Growing the Deliciously Ella brand

Things soon took off, at a time when the plant-based and vegan sphere was exploding into the mainstream and onto our supermarket shelves. But for Ella, it was never about the convenience of vegan cheese, chicken or burgers – it was always about health.

“My message is more plants for more people more of the time,” she smiles.

“We’ve seen really interesting movements, from the heyday of your meat mimics and now the growth really is in plant-based – it’s natural and it’s swapping a steak for the health benefits of chickpeas and tofu.

“For me, the thing that’s so exciting about a plant-based diet is that it’s so beneficial for our health. And then it’s obviously, from an environmental and an ethical perspective, so powerful as well.”

Healthy Made Simple

Now in 2024 and with two children plus a multi-faceted business to run, Ella needs her meals to be not just nutritious but quick and easy, which is where her new book Healthy Made Simple comes in.

“I’ve got a three year old and a four and a half year old, and when my four year old was born, I really fell out of love with cooking. I just had no time – I went back to work when she was four weeks old and I just really, really struggled.

“I needed more energy than I’ve ever needed. I needed the effects of eating well, but I just couldn’t find the motivation to do it.”

So she invented new rules for dinner time – easy vegan meals that had to be ready in under 30 minutes, with 10 or less main ingredients that could be bought at a local shop.

Eating well when you’re busy

“So many of us want to eat more healthily. We want to look after our gut health, we want to eat more vegetables. We know it’s really good for us, but we just really struggle to do it because life is so busy.

“Everyone has so many responsibilities, and I feel like Healthy Made Simple is a really genuine tool to allow people to do that in a feasible way.”

Featured image: Canva/Sophia Spring

Feeling inspired by Ella’s story? Listen to the full interview and other insights from vegan chefs, scientists and health experts on the Simply Vegan podcast