Deliciously Stella
The comedian poking fun at health bloggers
Anyone with an Instagram account will be familiar with the #EatClean wellness movement. From kale smoothies to spiralised courgetti, via the now-ubiquitous avocado on toast, health food bloggers have managed to make careers out of sharing their #GlutenFree #DairyFree #SugarFree (some would say #FunFree) diets with their millions of social media followers, who eagerly await their next update on buckwheat pancakes and vegan shakshuka.
But there is one Instagrammer turning the wellness trend on its head, with a satirical account so funny she has amassed 125,000 followers, and is now taking her filthy antidote to the clean-eating cult to the stage, with a comedy show at the Edinburgh Festival starting next week.
Deliciously Stella – run by 28-yearold comedian Bella Younger – uses the same #JuiceCleanse and #GetTheGlow hashtags beloved by fitness bloggers, to subvert the smugness of the genre. Her green juice of choice is apple schnapps and when she makes avocado and eggs on toast, she does so by combining guacamole with Haribo eggs. Her account is smattered with photos of her doing bicep curls with Curly Wurlys, eating Lindor chocolates instead of protein balls, and glugging Malibu instead of coconut water. It couldn’t be any further from the sweet potato brownies and chia puddings littering the accounts of Instagrammers like Deliciously Ella – the “health and happiness” author Ella Mills whose name Younger has hijacked.
“I knew I wanted to parody the wellness industry and I needed a name that would be catchy and people would notice,” explains Younger. “A lot of people asked, are you deliberately parodying Ella? Are you being mean? But there’s not one post that’s directly inspired by her. It’s a pastiche of everything on Instagram, like when people say they’re #Blessed.”
She tells me that Deliciously Ella has never acknowledged her (“I think she doesn’t really care. She’s too busy nailing life”) but celebrities like Millie Mackintosh, Davina McCall and Jamie Oliver – all known for their healthy lifestyles – count themselves as fans. “I can’t believe how popular Deliciously Stella is now,” she admits; her tonguein-cheek ‘‘cookbook’’ will be published in September.
But she has more in common with her namesake (Ella Mills’ mother is a member of the Sainsbury dynasty; her father, Shaun Woodward, was once teased for being the only Labour MP with a butler) than you might think. Bella – real name Arabella, although she prefers to “keep that under wraps” – is granddaughter of “Gentleman George” Younger, Margaret Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Scotland, who pushed for the poll tax to be introduced early across the border.
Although she hails from a long line of Scottish Tories – her uncle, James Younger sits in the House of Lords, her godfather is John Whittingdale, former secretary of state for culture – her accent bears no trace of a burr. She studied at Downe House – the boarding school also attended by Miranda Hart, Clare Balding and Kate Middleton – and is, as she puts it, “stupidly posh”. This has all become fodder for her comedy. Just before Deliciously Stella took off last year, Younger took a stand-up show called Champagne Socialist to the Fringe, where she mocked her attempts to “move to Hackney and become really edgy and Left-wing.”
Cue jokes about antlers falling off her bedroom wall onto her head, and mistakenly assuming a conversation about ‘‘shooting’’ video entailed the pastime she learnt on her grandfather’s estate in Scotland.
The posh jokes crop up again in her new Deliciously Stella show, where she fleshes out the background story of her character – a privileged but ditsy woman who lives in a flat “Daddy bought her” with her cousin Appallingly Sheila, who is addicted to having sex with her friends’ fathers.
But this time Younger has embraced her roots and is no longer pretending to be a socialist. “I was asked the other day if I could go for some de-elocution lessons to make my voice a bit less ‘Queeny’ but I said no,” she laughs. “The masses don’t really like posh people. But I don’t think my voice is even that bad – it used to be way worse – and I’m trying so hard to make fun of myself.
“I know I come from a similar background to [these health bloggers], but the difference is, I’m not telling people what to eat.”
Deliciously Stella was born last year, when Younger came across the clean eating movement on social media. “I spent a whole Sunday afternoon trawling through it. They were all beautiful, middle class white women who didn’t have to work and could spend all their time lying on the beach or arranging mixing bowls. I felt envious of them – their bodies and their lifestyles – but then I thought, how is this real? How are you always having a delicious smoothie on the beach?
“I started to find it really smug and irritating. The idea that I was ‘dirty’ because I was eating a Snickers bar annoyed me. Also, my mum bought some of their cookbooks and the food just isn’t nice.”
She decided to launch a comic account showing off her “gross” lifestyle, with the aim not just of making people laugh, but encouraging them to question the wellness industry and to stop feeling guilty about their eating habits.
“It’s become really fashionable to cut out food groups, like gluten. It seems insane to me that you would need to create an excuse to not eat something. It’s also really damaging, for women especially, to believe everything on Instagram. I want them to not take anything at face value. Because it’s not real. That person on Instagram has a personal trainer, they’re photoshopped.”
In spite of the doughnuts, sweets and fizzy drinks on her Instagram account, Younger says she has a “normal, balanced diet” – though she does eat everything she buys for props. “Sometimes if I go to the gym people are like, ‘I’m so disappointed in you’. But I’m allowed to exercise and eat vegetables. Yes, I eat a lot of Haribo but I also eat a lot of other things.”
For now, she’s gearing up for a month of performing as Deliciously Stella. She hopes it will lead to an opportunity to write Deliciously Stella, the sitcom. “I think the wellness industry is the new fashion PR. It’s the new Ab Fab territory.”