Comedian Deliciously Stella sends up the clean-eating brigade with hilarious Instagram account

You can’t scroll through Instagram these days without seeing an artful plate of avocado on toast or a smoothie bowl from a blogger promoting clean eating and wellness.

Heading up the movement are cookbook authors such as the Hemsley sisters and Ella Mills, otherwise known as Deliciously Ella, who share their healthy recipes for dishes like overnight oats and chia seed pudding online.

Now there’s a new face using the popular #eatclean and #gettheglow hashtags: but her meals are anything but healthy.

Bella, pictured with her version of a banana smoothie using sweet foam bananas, started the spoof account while she was working in food television

Deliciously Stella, aka 28-year-old comedian Bella Younger from west London, tops her avocado on toast with Haribo eggs for her spoof Instagram account

Bella’s tongue-in-cheek posts, such as this superfood salad using Super Noodles, skewer the clean eating movement with hilarious pictures of unhealthy food using the most popular health hashtags

Deliciously Stella, aka 28-year-old comedian Bella Younger from west London, tops her avocado on toast with Haribo eggs or Kinder Surprises, while her superfood salad uses chicken-flavoured Super Noodles.

In one picture she promotes a ‘new’ flavour of trendy coconut water (pineapple-flavoured Malibu), while in another she gushes about a new contouring technique (using barbecue sauce from McDonald’s).

The tongue-in-cheek spoof account has become a viral hit, with 134,000 followers, for its pitch-perfect skewering of the clean eating craze.

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‘I thought the whole clean eating movement was a bit po-faced and a little bit smug,’ says Bella, who worked in food television on shows including MasterChef until she became a comedian two years ago. 

‘A lot of people aren’t on the beach all the time, and personally it made me feel bad about myself because I don’t have all day to practice my yoga moves and go to brunch and Neal’s Yard. 

Bella’s photos, including one of avocado on toast topped with Kinder Surprise eggs, have gained her 134,000 Instagram followers

‘I now work as a comedian but at the time [of setting up the account], I was working 9am to 5pm in a normal job, getting up and being hungover at work with Hula Hoops in my hair, while all these perfect girls were setting this what seemed to me to be this completely unachievable example.’

Bella came up with the idea for the account while working in TV, when she had to do some research on up-and-coming chefs.  

‘I found so many of them were these clean eating bloggers,’ she remembers. ‘I spent a whole afternoon scrolling through my Instagram and thought: “How can so many people be eating eggs and avocado on toast?” and “How can there be so much beetroot in the world?”.

Her boss urged her to start a spoof account, which started with a few photos of her eating pastrami and being hungover.

Bella poses her unhealthy dishes, such as her ‘sweet potato salad’ of potato slices and sweets, in an artful way to emulate the glossy wellness pictures that flood Instagram

Now she posts pictures of sweets, fizzy drinks, alcohol and white carbohydrates with sincere-sounding inspirational messages that perfectly satirise the wellness movement.

Using plenty of popular health hashtags and promoting trendy products such as the Nutribullet, the posts range from a juice cleanse of Rubicon fizzy drinks to a sweet potato bowl made up of slices of normal potato next to some pick and mix sweets. 

The photos are often artfully shot next to jugs of fresh flowers or on wooden boards to emulate the glossy wellness pictures that flood Instagram. 

In one, she poses with a jug full of foam bananas, next to a post which reads: ‘Let’s go bananas for my brand new banana smoothie recipe! These delicious bananas are full of healthy potassium for a wellness kick. 

She also makes sure to add all the most popular wellness hashtags to lure in followers who might need to take a minute before realising they’re being sent up by the funnywoman.

‘Just pop them in the nutribullet and whizz! (My adorable rings are from @daisyknights and they spell kale! Get them while you still can!) #eatclean #gettheglow #banana #smoothie #freelee #fruit #nutribullet #5aday #fruit #healthychoices #wellness #nutrition #love #dream #everydaysacheatday #deliciouslystella.’

In one picture she promotes a ‘new’ flavour of trendy coconut water, which is actually pineapple-flavoured Malibu

In another snap, ‘Deliciously Stella’ goes on a juice cleanse consisting entirely of Rubicon fizzy drinks

Bella has now compiled her funniest posts into a tongue-in-cheek recipe book, which came out earlier this month, after creating an Edinburgh Fringe show based around the Stella character. 

She has even gone so far as to try one of her sweetie creations for real, but warns against anyone else doing the same.

‘I have tried the Haribo eggs on avocado toast, and it was disgusting,’ laughs Bella. 

‘It was awful. Just so weird with those those weird gummy sweets and the mushy avocado. Everything was wrong about it.

‘I wouldn’t make anything in my book, it’s all disgusting.’

Bella has now compiled her funniest posts into a tongue-in-cheek recipe book, which came out earlier this month

In one post, Bella gushes about a new contouring technique – using barbecue sauce from McDonald’s – to satirise the body beautiful movement

Bella, who sells branded tote bags which read ‘You can’t milk an almond’, is one of a handful of high profile figures such as Bake Off finalist Ruby Tandoh who are starting to speak out against the wellness movement.

‘The problem is that a lot of the claims that people are making are rooted in bad science,’ says Bella.

‘It’s the idea that gluten is bad for you, which has been scientifically proven not to be true, and there are all these things that they tell you that if you eat, you’ll die, and to replace sugar with maple syrup which also happens to be a sugar. 

‘You’d think, surely someone who’s written a book has gone on the Internet and thought, “Oh actually that’s not true, I probably shouldn’t say that in my cookbook that’s been bought by hundreds and thousands of people”.’

Bella also sells branded tote bags with the slogan: ‘You can’t milk an almond’. In this post, she advertises the bags next to what she describes as Malteasers ‘blissballs’

‘Deliciously Stella’ posted a picture of her take on strawberries and cream to celebrate the start of Wimbledon this summer – gummy strawberry sweets with milk bottles

She adds: ‘The diet industry has been telling women for so long that we need to look a certain way, and we need to reach a certain level of perfect, but as a whole with resurgence of modern feminism, I think everyone is now just like: stop telling me what to do.’

When Bella isn’t Stella, she says she eats ‘pretty normally,’ enjoying burgers and salads in equal measure.

But one thing she’s not a fan of is vegetables trying to be anything other than vegetables. 

‘I’m not a big fan of vegetables masquerading as cakes,’ she says. 

‘Deliciously Stella”s version of cleansing hot water and lemon is a cup of hot water and lemon sherbets

In another post, ‘Deliciously Stella’ picks strawberries from her garden – which are gummy sweets

‘I think if I’m going to have a cake, I want it to be a cake. I don’t it to be an avocado with some cacao and then called a cake because it’s not the same thing. 

‘Courgetti is fine, I’ve tried it, it’s not that bad, I just think it’s not pasta, that’s the bottom line. It’s not a complex carbohydrate, it’s not going to fill you up in the same way. 

‘It has its own merits, but stop trying to pass things off as other things. That’s what I find annoying.’ 

She adds: ‘Making a pizza base out of cauliflower is not going to taste as good as a pizza.

‘Eventually you’re going to crack and have 10 Domino’s.’

Deliciously Stella by Bella Younger is on sale for £9.99.