Deliciously Ella on having children in a pandemic: 'They're Covid babies and they don’t even know it'

Ella Mills has been busy. In 2020 Mills, aka Deliciously Ella, steered her vegan food business through an exceptional year, launched a new series of her podcast and gave birth to a daughter – her second in two years.

But none of this seems out of place for Mills, a woman who lives her life on fast-forward. At just 29, she is a successful entrepreneur, bestselling author, qualified yoga teacher, cafe owner and is also married with two children and a dog.

We are talking over Zoom to discuss the relaunch of her wellness app, which features hundreds of vegan recipes, fitness videos, meditations, and now a tracker where you can log your healthy habits.

Mills is dialling in from her west London home, in the precious hour over lunchtime when both her babies nap at the same time. She’s wearing a neat black top and matching oversized black glasses and sitting on an ochre-yellow sofa. She says a full night’s sleep is hard to come by with two babies under 18 months, but looks fresh-faced nonetheless.

“I’m so tired... but at least [my daughters] keep you so busy that you don't have time to really stop and think about it,” she laughs.

In 2011, at the age of 20, Mills was diagnosed with postural tachycardia syndrome, which causes heart palpitations, dizziness and extreme fatigue. After discovering that eating a whole-foods vegan diet – avoiding sugar and gluten as well as meat and dairy – vastly improved her symptoms she started to blog about it. It was around the time that other wellness stars, like the Hemsley sisters and Amelia Freer, were becoming well known. Mills gained attention – and followers – quickly and her first book came out in 2015, and has since been followed by five others.

She met husband Matthew Mills, son of late Labour cabinet member Tessa Jowell, in 2015. He started working for her company soon after, becoming CEO while Ella focused on the creative side. Together they launched a series of vegan snacks and started a family, with the birth of their first daughter, Skye, in 2019 followed by May in 2020.

The past year was an odd time to have a baby, admits Mills, who went to her pregnancy scans alone. Luckily, due to her choosing a home birth, she was able to have Matthew with her throughout labour. Mills says she valued the “little bit more certainty” of a home birth, knowing she could avoid the “traumatic experience” of labouring alone, which women up and down the country have done in the pandemic.

After May was born in October, restrictions relaxed enough for Mills’s mother to stay for the first few weeks to help with both babies. But besides her, baby May has met only a select few family members, including only one of Matthew’s four siblings. “It’s just so strange”, she says. “They're Covid babies and they don’t even know it.”

Luckily, May has been able to meet Ella’s father Shaun Woodward, former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Woodward separated from Ella’s mother, Camilla Sainsbury of the Sainsbury’s supermarket family, in 2015 after 28 years of marriage.

Shortly afterwards, he announced he was in a relationship with Luke Redgrave, a Hollywood camera operator. Mills previously told an interviewer that her parents splitting up was “sad” and “not one of the easiest things to deal with” but was accepting of her father’s new male partner.

Mills now tells me that her father is getting married to Redgrave. Their wedding was originally planned for the summer of 2020, but was pushed back because of the pandemic. The couple are trying to work out whether it might go ahead this year or next.

Mills won’t say too much more, but does add that daughters Skye and May are going to be bridesmaids. A delay might even be a benefit for the family, since the two of them will be a bit older and understand more of what is going on. “I think having the kids older [at the wedding] will actually be quite sweet,” smiles Mills. “It'll be lovely.”

Being pregnant and giving birth in the middle of a pandemic has had a few silver linings, says Mills. The crazy busyness of running a growing business meant that Mills took only four weeks of maternity leave after having her first baby, while her husband took just a single day.

This time around, Mills has had three months of maternity leave and is steadily easing herself back into part-time work now. Spending more time with their children while they work from home has been “the most unbelievable upside”, says Mills, who admits that before the pandemic they weren’t “always back for bedtime”.

“I’ve not missed a single thing with Skye in the last year: she learned to crawl, she learned to walk, she started saying words and I was there for all of that and I wouldn’t have been otherwise,” she says. “That is something we’ll be able to treasure.”

Are Mills and her husband getting sick of each other after spending all day and all night together? “We’re so used to doing everything together,” she laughs. “We started working together about four months after we got together, so we’ve really never known anything different.”

With so much on her plate, how does she deal with the stress? “Every day I have some kind of movement,” she says. “Sometimes it's just five minutes, sometimes it’s 10 minutes – sometimes, if I'm lucky, they’ll both nap at the same time and I’ll have an hour to myself”, she says.

Her favourite exercise is yoga, but she likes Pilates and barre too – all from her app, of course – while her husband prefers high-intensity cardio sessions.

She’s recently taken another leap forward for her health, too. In December, she finally got glasses to fix the double vision she has lived with for her whole life. Aged six she was prescribed “inch thick” glasses, which corrected the issue. But they made her feel self-conscious, so for about a decade she has lived with not being able to see very well and with “big headaches” as her eyes were “always strained”.

With a new thinner type of lens she can now see just one of everything, meaning no more headaches or squinting. “It feels like magic”, she says.

So what is there to look forward to in 2021 for Mills? She has a new season of her podcast coming out, where she interviews different health experts to discover better ways to look after yourself. Her London deli is being renovated and will (depending on the pandemic) reopen as a restaurant, serving more refined table-service fare.

And will there be a 2021 baby, to go along with the ones she had in 2019 and 2020? “We have our hands really full with one each for now”, she laughs. “I think we'll have at least two years of not being pregnant, which I have to say I'm quite excited for.”

The Deliciously Ella app is available for iOS devices from the App Store and Android devices from the Play Store for 99p a month