Ella Mills - How A Journey Of Self-Discovery Helped Others To Live A Healthier Life

0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo

0:34Welcome back. I'm still at my friend's studio, Kate Dowdy. Thank you, Kate. You're wonderful. It's such a beautiful space and the light is so beautiful. And I hope you can grasp a few of the artworks around, which are so inspiring. And my guest today is one that I waited to meet for a very long time, Ella Mills. If you are from the United Kingdom, you would know Ella with her brand, Deliciously Ella, which was incredibly and still is but it became incredibly successful as I started to interact more with the UK early in the times when Solve for Happy was published and yeah at the time she had an incredibly famous and popular podcast that she cleverly decided to put on hold for a while and I wanted to be on that podcast so now she is on mine.

1:24Ella is a very very successful businesswoman. She is a beautiful brand for healthy eating. She is truly a representation of what she tells the world in many ways. But more importantly, if you dig deeper below the brand, you would see an incredible story of vulnerability, of success, of perseverance, of resilience, and of living true to her feminine, I would say, in a very interesting way. So one of my heroes, I hope you'll enjoy this as much as I will, Ella Mills. Ella, thank you for being here. No, thank you for having me. I don't know how to begin. I get confused following you because you're...

2:11Me too. Your story is a beautiful roller coaster where, I don't know, I mean, you confirmed this today as I met you, but even on the screen, you're beautifully delicate and feminine. And the world takes you through journeys of enormous success. And then the typical approach of the British media is to try and... I never understood, actually. I never understood why they attacked healthy eating. Like, does it make any sense to me? Me neither. And then put you at the face of that. And then, you know, I also don't understand what the British people would sign on to that. But it seems that whatever the media will say, they'll believe.

2:56And then you get back into enormous success. And then, you know, like with your podcast, you choose to let go of some of them. And from the external eye, it feels like very erratic if you think about it. But then as I look deeply at your statements that maybe some people don't listen to, I find a very beautiful journey of self-discovery, of trying to be in alignment with who you really are, which I really think is amazing. so for our international viewers who or listeners who may not know you and may not know your story maybe if you're comfortable share with us what made Ella Ella yeah absolutely well it all started in in 2011 up until that point kind of nothing really of note but I was in my second year at university and I was deeply unambitious I really didn't know who I was or who I wanted to be I had a very limited sense of self and and relatively poor self-esteem but I in retrospect I know that I didn't really know that at the time couldn't quite put my finger on why I wasn't happy as such and but out of what felt like nowhere I became very very ill and I spent the rest of 2011 11 in bed or in nap hospitals.

4:20And I saw every neurologist and gastroenterologist and endocrinologist and I had MRIs and ultrasounds and colonoscopies and endoscopies and goodness knows how many blood tests and... What was the problem? So I had effectively a malfunctioning of my autonomic nervous system. So everything that should be happening automatically wasn't. So the conditions characterized by this inability to control your heart rate so when you sit down your heart rate's normal so say it's 60 and then i would stand up and within a second or so my heart rate is 180 190 yeah and your blood pressure can drop at the same time and so either you feel like you'll black out you will black out but essentially it feels like your head is disconnected from your body and but then within that then so many other systems aren't working properly either so i actually looked more pregnant at that point than i did when i was about seven months pregnant with my daughter yeah I had extreme chronic fatigue I would sleep for kind of 18 hours a day at the worst points the idea of standing up was so exhausting it was kind of hard to comprehend had chronic pain and chronic infections um had pins and needles in my body all the time because my blood wasn't circulating properly and I was on about 25 or so different medications a day and they're all repurposed from other conditions no one promises that they'll work but I think I just assumed that they would right you have this kind of I think at that point slightly blind trust in in uh in experts and and having the solution and what then transpired was that none of them worked some of them made a small difference some of them had side effects that made other things work and essentially we kind of ended up a year later having not really made any progress and what was very clear was that I would never be able to live whatever a normal life is and I think every year of life you you get to live you realize that there's no such thing as a normal life but the things you take for granted like getting a job and living away from home etc like that just wasn't going to be plausible for me um and I think it was in realizing that which I'd slightly I think it would be fair to say I took no responsibility whatsoever for the first year of the illness and I just consistently wanted someone else to have the solution I felt that my life was unfair.

6:40I felt, why me? That whole kind of rhetoric. And I, yeah, I took no responsibility or did nothing to help myself. And so interesting when you talk about this, I had the exact opposite. I don't actually talk about this publicly. But when I started to jump into corporate America very heavily, I started to have what I thought was like irritable bowel syndrome. And my response to that was to completely ignore it and just run like mad. And I would go to specialists. I remember vividly after like 10 or so specialists, someone told me there's this guy in a city that's 120 kilometers away. And so I would go to him every other week for I don't know how long until he eventually said, okay, we've tried every medicine now.

7:28So all we can do is try them again. And when you tell the story, I was like, oh, so you were just experimenting on me and he said yeah I have no idea what you're going through and eventually believe it or not it just turned out to be uh you know food allergies yeah and and you know I was eating the exact foods I shouldn't be eating and I did that for like nine years running I was a disaster and they were just experimenting on me it's crazy really yeah I know and that's the thing and I just so wanted and they were you know it wasn't as a criticism to the doctors they were they were doing what they could do but i i just wanted them to fix it for me and um and i guess that's been like one of my biggest lessons in life is learning that that's not really how the world works if you don't get to where you want by thinking someone else will do it for you um how old were you at the time 21 oh so very young yeah but i mean no blame there no no no exactly you but um anyway and it was in in this realization that basically i was never as I said it wasn't ambitious it's not like I had this clear sense of what I wanted for my life but what was clear was that any any of the potential avenues I could explore any of the things I may or may not want in my life none of which was going to be possible if I continued on the trajectory that I was on and I had no friends at this point I was a complete you know it's in a very dark place and I think it was in finally taking responsibility and the the time that the doctor said I don't have anything else and is that kind of that was such a crashing weight and I think as that sort of subsided and was absorbed I realized like okay I'm gonna have to do something it's like okay either I do something and we try and change the trajectory or you give up essentially and like I couldn't really see the point in in being here at that point but I had no idea what to do like absolutely no idea whatsoever and so we started googling and reading stories about other people all around the world who do use different approaches but this kind of focus on diet and lifestyle and changing the way they looked after their bodies and there was this amazing common thread of that having a huge difference in treating their various different illnesses and I just felt okay I mean I had nothing to lose at this point if it worked for them maybe it would work for me but I couldn't cook I had no idea what healthy food was and in particularly like vegetables so I was you know I wasn't starting from the best place and um so I thought okay well that's what I'll do and I knew I needed some kind of focus I because I couldn't do anything I didn't do anything and so I sat all day and I slept or I literally stared at the ceiling or I refreshed my Facebook page where I watched terrible reality tv and like while that might be nice for a weekend you know nine months later it's not good for your brain and so I thought okay well I'll do this as a project I will teach myself to cook and I will see if this works um so I started writing it all down and that was delicious the ella.com um so where everything started that's amazing so you started that without knowing if it will work or not no i had no idea couldn't cook recipes were so bad to start with and um but it was you know i'd been on and off this cocktail of medications for a year and at no point did i feel they were working like something might help one symptom but then it would have a side effect for something else and so I never felt I never kind of saw any semblance of light during that year um but within about two months of changing the way that I was eating I did start to feel not like I was leaping out of bed and running down the street by any means but I started to feel this glimmer of something shifting and you know the brain fog was a little bit less the pain was a little bit less like getting out of bed was just a little bit easier and it took two years or so to really get to a point of for want of a better word normal um health um so was it was a slow process um which was yeah definitely taught me a lot about resilience and I did a rehabilitation exercise program by a doctor at the same time and I mean I was on one of those kind of reclined rowing machines.

12:05And I would do five minutes and sleep for about two hours afterwards. And so again, and I built that up over a year to be able to do 45 minutes on a cross trainer. And having been able to not even do five minutes on a rower, that was obviously enormous for me. So are you telling me that fatigue, brain fog, heart condition, and you just chose food? Okay, I'm going to eat differently. That to me is sort of like, to my engineer's mind, I would go like, okay, we need to invent a little valve that goes on the heart and does this, and then we need to do that. I mean, it appears to me like a much more complex problem than just food.

12:50It was certainly a much more complex problem. And I think sort of over the years I've understood a little bit more and a little bit more about why it might have worked, like reducing inflammation, massively improving gut health, etc. You can see why it would start to make an impact. But it also makes sense that it took me about two years to feel normal-ish and about five years to live a kind of normal life again. So it was a very, very, very slow process. And you still stuck to it? Still stuck to it. And I think my and my mom was absolutely instrumental in that. She would always say, because I would find it very hard that you are taking.

13:30And I'm sure everyone can relate to this in different parts of their life. You know, you're working so hard at something and it's so difficult and it's requiring such discipline and sacrifice. And you feel like you're taking one step forward and two step backwards. And, you know, I would feel like I was really making improvement and I would have three days where I could leave the house and I could do things. And then I would have pushed it a little bit far and I would spend four days back in bed again. And I'd feel like I was back at square one. And she would always remind me, like, this bad day is better than your bad day two months ago.

14:02Like, yes, it's a bad day. Such an insightful way of looking at it. But it's a better bad day. It's a better bad day. It's a better bad day. And she was so, she was absolutely right. Like, whilst I was still in bed, I would be, you know, the room would feel like it was spinning a bit less. Like, I would be able to read. Oh, my God, Ella. So it was a really, and I don't think I could have done it without having that consistent. Yeah, I mean, in general, I think every progress we've ever made in life depends on that, depends on the fact that, you know, you go to the gym for the first, you know, two weeks, and you will only feel the pain and see no progress whatsoever.

14:40And the idea is, can you stay the course, basically? Exactly. And I think in the world today, that's very challenging. Like, we just love a quick fix yeah yeah we're very used to instant gratification and so something that feels like it's going to take you years is not particularly appealing which is why i wanted the doctors to have the answers i wanted to take a pill and not have to do anything yeah like i wanted someone else to solve it for me and i think what we're saying to our viewers is that doesn't work does it yeah i think rarely and obviously that's like one specific circumstance but i think anything yeah anything i can think of ultimately like i think we are so deeply responsible for ourselves yeah um but it's a very hard thing to take on board i spent the weekend on a retreat an amazing experience we had 146 people who you would expect it's an unstressable retreat you would expect that you get like the most stressed people in the world, right?

15:42So we were really dreading it walking in myself and Alice, my co-author. But then they turned out to be some of the most impressive, amazing, loving, lovable sort of spiritual seekers who are trying to find better version of themselves, even though this version is doing really well. And, you know, we were discussing that idea of doing the work and, you know, how happiness for most of us is like, okay, so life gave me this wonderful partner for a week. Thanks, life. I'll be happy. He annoyed me next week. So what's up with your life? Can you fix it? Right? And you saw we were talking about that idea of no, it's never going to be that way.

16:21It's always going to, you're going to have to do the work. It's your only choice, basically. Yeah. I want to continue on your personal story because I think it's really, really inspiring. But let's just take a tangent a tiny bit about food. So you said it reduces inflammation, it does this, it does that. There are lots of people out there that claim that if you eat healthy, a lot of the stuff will go away. A lot of what we now consider normal illnesses, like normal illnesses is a very strange word, but we just go on, get on with it and swallow a pill would disappear. You know, How true is that?

16:58I mean, it's hard to be kind of totally binary in the response because there's a huge number of people that are affected by all sorts of conditions where that's not true in any shape or form, and it's wildly frustrating to have that, like, any conversation that feels kind of sweeping statements. That being said, there's also an extraordinary number of people with lifestyle-related diseases that potentially don't have to feel the way that they feel right now. And that there are ways of alleviating, reversing, minimizing what they feel every day. But ultimately, it's incredibly difficult to change it.

17:40Like the world that we live in today, the health or lack thereof landscape is you kind of have to go against the status quo almost all day, every day to make healthy choices. And of course, it depends where you live in the world. Like if you live in LA, you're probably feeling that a little bit differently. But certainly if you're living in the UK, if you're living in a huge part of the world, like the vast majority of the food that you can buy, I mean, almost 70 % of the calories we consume in this country come from ultra processed food. Yeah. Like that means almost 70 % of the food that we're eating is actively probably quite harmful for our health.

18:17And we know that now. And, you know, it's taken people a long time to sort of slowly catch up with it. but we know that emulsifiers are terrible for our gut health we know our gut health is pivotal to our physical health but also to our mental health and it's like i think we're starting to pieces of the puzzle together and understand why potentially we need to change the way that we eat but then actually going to do that day in and day out i don't think you can underestimate how difficult it actually is to do because you go into any supermarket any shop and the vast majority of was being sold to you is actually quite bad for your health.

18:53That's a very, very profound, but true statement, I'll have to say. I mean, did you see that donut guy around the corner here? I swear. I mean, like, and I'm, you know, I don't even like sweet things anymore, but he's so good at it. And I'm like, I need one of those every time I pass by. But it's not just that. It's also that when you go to the supermarket, anything that's within a box is not right for you. not necessarily like there's there's definitely there's a fundamental difference between processed food and ultra processed food but it's yeah it's it's just very difficult to navigate and there is nothing wrong with having a donut there's nothing wrong with having did you just say that yeah but if it's stop can we pause the recording for a minute yeah exactly but it's you know it's just about you know and it's a frustrating word in so many ways because it can be so kind of um untangible for people but it is about balance like if what the vast majority of what you're eating is a kind of plant rich whole food diet where you're cooking chickpeas and lentils and carrots and things and then you eat a donut donut's not going to do anything but we love rules and we love all or nothing and we love a diet and so that's a very difficult sell for people but also you really have to go out of your way to do to make the healthy choices and people have a extraordinary number of responsibilities in their life pulled in a thousand and one different directions everybody is extraordinarily time poor and so I don't underestimate how difficult it is to make the change but the difference that people feel when they start to switch the way they eat is quite extraordinary and I think at that point it's quite hard to go back to how you ate before because you feel it very quickly.

20:36Oh, 100%. Yeah, 100%. It's around this time, exactly this time last year, I went on a 40 days silent retreat. I always do that in August. And I ordered a food plan, but I knew the founder of the company, so I described to her exactly, I said I want an anti-inflammatory food plan. And oh my God, Ella, like day five. It's not even that long. No. Yeah, I just, I was a totally different person To the point that, and food plans are not a lot of food, they're not little food. I ordered a little extra because I was away on retreat and so on. But I just flipped my life upside down. It's incredible, really.

21:15Then you go back to the real world and you're traveling and you're... And it's really hard to keep it up. And I think that's why I think you just, I can't overemphasize enough the challenge that it takes, I think, to continue to implement that. but then equally how much we collectively need to it's a it's a difficult conversation so what does ella eat today what did i eat today i mean in general your day my day i eat like i eat very simply to be honest i've got a lot of commitments in my life and i've got two little kids as well and so i have a huge amount of time to cook and i do really miss that like i really miss um having more time to cook and in the evenings and things because by the time i've got my kids in Tibet, it's late.

22:00And, you know, but it's so it's not, it's simple things. It's like quick veggie stir fries with a miso dressing, lots of garlic and ginger, or it's like every time I cook something, I make three or four times as much. So I put it in the freezer. So I make lots of curries and dahls and just easy veggie based dishes. But yeah, I basically, my freezer is just full of little bags. And freezer is okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, that would change my life, interestingly, in a very interesting way. Don't always have a freezer, but when I'm at home. But when you're at home, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

22:33So back to Ella. That was the time when Deliciously Ella started. Exactly. I actually don't know exactly what we loved about you. Did we love your cooking, your recipes, your message, or yourself? We didn't, you know, there was something magical about Deliciously Ella when it came out. I don't know what it was and I don't say that to be like wildly self-deprecating I just I don't think I'll ever really know or ever really understand what it was about what I was doing that had such an impact the site had 130 million hits in the first two years and I and I I can't it's frustrating now obviously we have our business like my husband and I own it together we worked so hard and at that point I was not working so hard like I didn't I wasn't trying and it somehow just resonated with people in such a unexpected way and it's interesting because I as I said earlier like I didn't have particularly high self-esteem in fact I had very poor self-esteem I that obviously took a real beating when I got ill and I became even more kind of unsure of myself and who I was in the world and I was very uncomfortable with myself in being ill.

23:57And so I wanted it to be really anonymous. I wanted it to be about the food. I didn't really want to bring myself into it. But back in 2011, early 2012, these sorts of recipes were very niche. It was quite weird. Why are you doing this? And so a friend of mine, and I only told her about it. I didn't show it to anybody else for the first three months. I was very embarrassed. I thought everyone would think I was very weird. But she said, I just don't really understand. I think if you don't have literally an about page and anyone who comes across this website, they've got to know why you're doing it.

24:39They're just going to feel weird otherwise. You need to write your story and you need to say what you're trying to do and what the point of the site is. and so we sat down and I think it was again it was the first time I'd sort of owned my story effectively and what had happened and why I was trying to change the trajectory of my life and where I was at that point which was very cathartic actually and because I didn't really know how to talk about what was happening and because I was quite unsure of myself I basically hadn't told anyone what had happened i just stopped talking to people um and it's not my best personality trait um but i'm very introverted really and i you are yeah and i am like weirdly shy which is very counter intuitive and being in the spotlight all the time but um yeah so i it was the first time i think as well a few months later when when i did show some people what i've been doing that people were like oh that's where ella's been for the last year like i thought she just stopped talking to us um and kind of went off the deep end and so that was quite cathartic anyway the site just suddenly took off and i think there's always a right time right place right when when things are successful i don't know if you feel that in any way with your work that it's just it coincides with a moment in which people are looking for the sorts of things that you do and suddenly there's just a kind of collective shift in thinking about their mental health or thinking about their physical health.

26:12And I think that coincided with a real lack of resources. I never would have started Delicious Yellow if I got ill today because there's just no need. I would have found all the recipes that I was looking for from other people, but none of them existed at that point, which is why I started doing them and why I started cooking. And so, yeah, I think there was a right time, right place. it was a kind of early start of this conversation around what we eat having such a big impact on our health and our well-being. I think that's it. And I guess there was, as the story went on, and my health obviously started to get better, I think there was, it was a story that really interested people on taking food and making yourself better with it.

26:54I think that's it. If you ask me now that you say it, it's super clear for me. Because in a very interesting way, you did not do this because you were starting a business and having a business plan and trying to grow the hits by this much and you know improve the following by that much and so on which is the typical way everyone does business and then they pretend to have a persona and then they pretend to put that persona online and sometimes they fool people with it I mean this slow-mo being you know in the top five now almost consistently in health and well-being I have idea why. I honestly don't know why you guys like this.

27:31I really don't know. But to me, that message of slowing down in comparison to how I lived my incredibly fast-paced life as a executive is very, very genuine to me. And as I myself started to slow down and reflect on topics that matter really, just flipped my life upside down. And so I think there is something about the lack of genuine honestly sometimes I think about it I'm snowmo seems to be my biggest arm of making a difference because of its reach as part of one my one billion happy mission but I promise you I don't film it because of that I film it because I wanted to meet you honestly you know what I mean I love that idea of spending an hour and a half two hours a week with someone that will inspire me and teach me something and the fact that we film it is the bonus if you want and i think that's the thing isn't it just it comes through when it's so genuine and i never meant to start a business at all it never meant even a tiny bit end up doing what we do now and i think that it's a very unusual way to start a business but it has has worked not because it was meant to work but because i think you start to create a genuine connection with people and there's a reason to believe that's not just the price point on shelf or what packaging looks like etc yeah but but you are a shrewd businesswoman are you not no like and i again and it's a really interesting one because i i think i would have found that really hard to say in the past.

29:15I probably have like very, I think I'm a very contradictory person with a huge number of conflicting personality traits, probably. I'm a Gemini, so I feel like that speaks so perfect. Yeah, I hope you guys are enjoying the four of us talking to Gemini. But no, I mean, and so I did it until 2015 by myself. And my first book came out in January 2015 no the first thing I did I didn't I started in cooking classes and supper clubs and things but that was all very small and but I guess a very like your mission you know one billion happy and I've never quantified how many people I want to reach but I wanted to reach a big number of people I wanted to I just had this and I still have it and sometimes I'm like why do I do this I'm so tired I quit but I still you know anytime I have a conversation like this it's really reignited like I never want people to feel how I felt if they don't have to and I know you you get that and it's and so that's what spurs me on and it keeps bearing me on and so I've always wanted what we do to reach the biggest number of people as possible not because everybody has to engage in it but because hopefully that will you know allow as many people as would like to to be able too and I so I did an app in 2014 and that was the first moment that I was like what's happening here so it was a very simple recipe app I think it was$1.99 or$2.99 and I went to number one in the whole of the app store and it had no I mean when I say no marketing like I was 23 or something at this point it was just me working by myself with an Instagram page and it went to number one on the app store and I thought okay this is quite interesting I think people with a lot of money spend a lot of time trying to get to that spot you know with massive number of people highly qualified people and on the back of that I approached um several publishers to write a book and and I um got commissioned to write the book by um my publisher at that point and that came out in January 2015.

31:22And again, it wasn't expected to be a success. It really wasn't. But it became the fastest selling debut cookbook ever in the UK. Spent eight weeks consecutively, another one on Amazon across any category, fiction, nonfiction. And it really ignited this conversation on health and wellness in a way that hadn't happened in this country up until that point. It was really the first of its kind. And obviously, there's lots of amazing people working in this space now lots of people making a profound difference but it was very novel and that was an extraordinary experience but it um it was all very kind of reactive and uh fluid and sort of um like ideas based at that point and I met my now husband three weeks after the book came out oh yeah is that true yeah yeah did he coach you or did you find him he found me yeah oh yes of course but through our parents was that true yes it wasn't like he saw you on a tv interview and said she's mine no well you know what i say i love it's not that it's not that far off it um his mom and my dad had worked together for a long long time and i didn't know him and i had met his mom but he knew my dad and that's an advantage it's an advantage exactly anyway he was working in a social impact group in West Africa and they had been hit really hard by Ebola and so they were sort of kind of scratching around on what to do next and he was very interested in what I was doing with food and could there be some connection between what they were doing they had a huge number of farms etc and so he reached out to my dad was like we've just been reading is that what he told him that's what he told oh no we have to get him and see what's true yeah no no no no that's yeah that's the he went interview that i did in the times and that was how he was like oh i know her dad anyway and so we we actually moved in together a week later yeah yeah engaged three months later he'd quit his job and and to work together but he is the business person in in the partnership it's it's really not me it's i everything about the essence of delicious siela as me the reason that we do what we do how we do it and why we do it and it actually really existing as it is today is all him that's so interesting that's basically really enabled each other yeah but it's also almost as if life is saying this needs to be complete it needs to work these are a few too many interesting coincidences one after the next to get you to a place where you are i mean i take my hat hat off to him yeah i think he should write a book about courting the woman that you want i think that would sell really well if you ask me yeah talk to her dad and say ebola west africa wink wink but uh but also i mean to convince her to move in a week later a week later yeah was that his idea or you it was both of us no he made you think it was both of us it's brainwashing no it was just this really i think we both felt a bit lost in our lives and we met each other and it was just this extraordinary sense of feeling at home and oh that's so beautiful as someone also who didn't even know if they believed in marriage or like you know anything it was a it was a bit of a i was certainly not someone who would like believe in a soulmate premise or a love at first sight or anything along that realm of possibility so it was uh yeah i definitely wasn't looking for it which is what's even more interesting about it.

35:04But that was also the time when the media started to... That was about two years later that that really turned. Yeah, that was sort of beginning of 2017, end of 2016. What was that about? So there had been this kind of complete explosion about healthy living and healthy cooking and, you know, and a huge number of books published and everything over that sort of 18 month two year period which in my opinion can only be a good thing but not for the media yeah I think there was this sense of you know don't tell us what to do and yeah everyone can live their own lives and you know I don't want to eat kale so so go away in the simplest form of it but it's interesting and again like I was I was very young and inexperienced and not confident enough that I think I would handle it very very very differently at this point but it was the whole kind of backlash and the whole conversation was solely focused on women there was everyone who was sort of criticized as part of this healthy eating movement which was such a terrible thing which even just saying that out loud feels so ironic given the state of our health and the state of the NHS as a result is it does it feels ironic that we're so cross about healthy eating but there we go everyone who was criticized as part of that conversation was a woman there were no which is so interesting and okay i'm gonna make a joke this is a joke it's because you talk about quinoa too much i can't stand quinoa and it was very yeah it was very interesting and there was lots of men obviously of course involved in this space what you're saying is that a male chef wouldn't be criticized but a woman well they weren't and a lot of them talked a lot more about weight loss and before and after like I have never once mentioned weight loss we've never talked about it we would never talk about it so it was just this very interesting lens so and the media reporters that were in that space obviously were not women no well no no lots of them were and you know there was one that wrote a whole article about how I was just like Donald trump i mean it was really like you yeah it was it was really i didn't read it i was like i can't yeah good practice yeah yeah but yeah it was it was very vindictive and it was highly personal and it was debate is very important but this was not a debate this was yeah it was very strange but it's also really bizarre when we live in a world of increased lifestyle related diseases increased obesity increased childhood obesity when we know we have to change the way we you know 25 percent of people manage to eat their five a day like we're so far away from eating the way we need to eat and we have yeah worsening both mental health and physical health like we have to change our approach to food so it's very interesting i think if i had only written books on how to bake very indulgent cakes i don't think i would have had any criticism so at all yeah no which is it is but you wouldn't have had the love either i think no it's not really you so no Oh, exactly.

38:08And I would never have done it. But it was just, I've always found that kind of an interesting... If you put it all together, the criticism and the media... But it was a lot of young women. And I think it was, yeah, a frustration with kind of young women coming in and this sense of telling people what to do. And I would never want anyone to feel I was telling them what to do. It's really about sharing the options. What you believe you should do. Exactly. If you want to engage in it or you don't. Yeah. Did it work for you at all? I mean, did you believe that at the end of it, did they tell the world more about your work?

38:42And so you find more people to love you? Or was it painful without? No, it was really painful, actually. I think it was really, yeah, it was really painful. When I started Soul4Happy, I'm actually going to be with Piers Morgan again tonight. And I actually am starting to like him a lot. But the first time I published Soul4Happy, and I wasn't really well experienced with the media in the UK. I mean, I was a Google executive. so I knew how to handle media in general. But I went on a Piers Morgan show and basically he started hammering me. And halfway through, I said, I'm here to talk about happiness.

39:19Why are you so grumpy? It was really, it was quite interesting because I think there is something specifically about the British media, maybe, I mean, everywhere, but I think it's very accentuated, if you want, in the British media of like, we're not going to talk about the positive side of anything. We're just going to look specifically for the negative angle and we're going to associate it with the face and then we're going to hammer that face basically yeah i mean it makes for good reading right yeah i think that's yeah yeah you know in some senses of the word good yeah and um so yeah it made me feel very introverted so you hide you hid the way absolutely yeah yeah it made me feel very vanilla.

40:03Like I didn't want to really have an opinion anymore. Yeah, you didn't want to stand out. You don't really want to kind of stick your head above the parapet. You don't want to stand out. And it took me a long, long, long time to come back from there. So yeah, you did three Deliciously Ella books until then? Until then, yeah. And now? Four. So only one after? No, Before, more after. Before, more after. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I felt I really wanted to just remove myself from it. I was just very, yeah, lacking an opinion. And yeah, just I really struggled to get my head around it. And we had a really similar experience around the same time because when we started, my husband and I, Matthew, working together, there were two clear routes to go down, either um sites like a premise uh or um to like uh food to go or um foods and supermarkets and so we thought we'd try both and we would see which one was going to work better or it was going to be a little bit of both who knows and so we opened our first cafe at the end of 2015 that december and we started selling our products into retail in mid-2016.

41:23And by mid-2017, it was very, very clear that the retail products was the future of the company. Yeah, cafes are very difficult. Wildly difficult and hugely expensive. Absolutely. And we didn't want to sell 80 % of the company to raise enough money to be able to open them. And we didn't need to do that to do the products business. Yeah, it's the same amount of pressure. Exactly. And doing both was not feasible because the products business was taking off at such a huge rate. And so we thought we decided to close. We had three cafes at this point and we decided to close two of them, keep the biggest one.

42:01We've now turned that into a restaurant. And it was a really difficult decision. Obviously, you know, it means people lose some jobs. But also like from a kind of brand perspective, obviously it's complicated. and you know removing a sense of ego from things that you do is it's hard it's a big life lesson you know you don't want people to think that you have failed as such and it was a really interesting experience like we knew we needed to get to about six or seven sites to make the the model really make sense because by three you have high operating costs and and high people costs and and we'd got to three and they're all profitable site level they were where we wanted them to be but the business didn't make sense until you probably had another two to three at least um and we decided not to do that and so to close the two yeah and there was just this again like it was only a few months later and people were just loving that we had what they said was failed loving it yeah and it was such an insightful experience and like i had a you know a very good girlfriend of mine say like she had a few because of the papers wrote about it to the point that one of the big four the big four retailers the ceo called me and was like do we need to have a serious conversation like are you gonna have all your products off shelf because you've gone bust it's like we haven't gone bust this is a like the reporting is so at odds with the reality and not a single one of the successes you know we'd gone from having no products in no stores to having i I can't remember what it was, like 10 products in 6 ,000 stores in 12 months.

43:44You know, huge growth. None of that. That wasn't even mentioned at any point. Not even as like an asterisk to the end. It was literally just like Delicious Yellow fails and closes business. That's the headline that people will pick up. Exactly. But yeah, I had this girlfriend say, you know, she had a few of her friends who called her up like quite gleeful, like quite thrilled that it wasn't working for us. and it was an interesting experience and again it was just this yeah I mean running a business and owning a business and and talking to that many people every day it's as like humbling as it gets and it keeps you kind of completely grounded because there's always a problem to say the least but it was realizing yeah the kind of complexities and nuances of standing out and doing things differently and deciding to, yeah, kind of try and make a mark.

44:39And that can be quite uncomfortable for other people. Yeah. I mean, I co-founded a couple of food businesses. Nightmares. Absolute nightmares. There's so much responsibility around it as well. You want everything to be perfect. You want the food to be healthy. You want the hygiene to be 100 % you can't afford 99.99 and they're just very demanding they're just very very very demanding and then you I think like you but of course I'm never in the spotlight with that other side of me but like you it just doesn't make sense at all because the same amount of effort could start two other businesses you know yes you're right if you fund it properly and waste a lot of resources on the path and end up with a large number of outlets it's a scale business but it would take your entire life you would literally be able to do nothing else no and it was just realizing exactly that like i think i think learning to accept where you've made mistakes and made things and got things wrong and the quicker you act on it the better yeah but that's a hard thing to do in a in a kind of more public landscape i think that's hard for anybody to do in their lives is you know it's often why we stay in relationships, why we stay in jobs, why we stay living in some place or stay in friendships, et cetera, that it's hard to say, you know, put your hand up and say, look, I got this wrong.

46:00I don't think this is the right thing. Yeah. Can I ask you a personal question? How is working with your husband? I know it's so weird because people just, no one gets, like everyone thinks it's strange, but it's honestly amazing. Is it? Yeah. It's in so many ways, like the foundation of, well, I was going to say the foundation of our relationship because we've never not worked together essentially like within three months of being together we were working together and it was harder in a way at the beginning because you know obviously when you're in a startup and there's like four or five people technically you might have a job you don't really have a job like everybody has the same job and it's all this like all hands on deck everyone's in the same meeting basically and it's just this kind of frantic mess it was really fun but it is a frantic mess and but now as the company's grown and and we've evolved we have such different jobs like most days we go into work together and we come home together and I love that and you have this extraordinary understanding of the other person like I couldn't have underestimated less how difficult it is to own a business like that level of responsibility oh yeah the relentlessness of it and having that as a problem shared is such a gift and i think we understand each other so completely but the other thing is then you like when the other person excels like you really understand it you know because i understand all the complexities that have gone into something coming off the head yeah and you know when when When it goes right and you see that, like, I think you have, it's just a very kind of rich way of living together, I think, because you understand every part of the other person.