The Accidental Influencer

I paused for ten seconds so it looked like I was finishing something important.

‘Can you do some research on wellness please? Some girl called Deliciously Ella’s got the fastest-selling cookbook in the country and I want to know if we should put her on the telly.’

I had been blissfully unaware of wellness up until that point. As far as I was concerned, wellness was just the opposite of illness, like not having a hangover or a cold. The idea that you could be more well than well had never crossed my mind.

Sure, I knew about diets. I knew that cutting carbs was the fastest way to lose weight and that I should be eating my 5 a day. I’d noticed a recent uptick in my friends going to yoga and buying NutriBullets, but chia seeds and bee pollen were as far from my wheelhouse as barbecued guinea pig. Until that afternoon, I simply did not know they existed.

It soon became clear that middle-class consumers worshipped at wellness’s altar, and when wellness is a religion, everyone needs a priest. If Gwyneth Paltrow is wellness’s Pope, Deliciously Ella is the Archbishop of Canterbury. Ella had used her new ‘lifestyle not diet’ to manage a chronic condition called PoTS, which affects the central nervous system. She had written a popular blog about her condition, claiming to be a reformed sugar monster. You can never be too rich or too thin, as the old adage goes, and nobody embodied that ethos to me more than Deliciously Ella. Ella Woodward was model-beautiful, her mother was a Sainsbury and they had a live-in butler and a house on Mustique.

Her blog promised that if you ate like her you could be like her, and her Instagram made her life look pretty amazing. No one ever mentioned that becoming a wellness influencer takes time, effort and funds. No one seemed to care that you can’t post a picture of you doing a headstand on a tropical beach without a trip to the tropics. Her feed was full of gushing women admiring her perfect life and thanking her for saving them from their disgusting, sugar-filled lives.

‘I’m not going to let some rich stick insect tell me what I can and cannot eat!’ I barked at Faye.

‘Why, Bella? Does it remind you of school?’ Faye loved joking about me being posh. At my boarding school eating disorders were so rife we could have been a feeder school for the Priory. I’d have put money on my peers being into this.

Sure enough, I got stuck into my research and found that Deliciously Ella was not alone. There were reams of these ‘wellness warriors’ looking to turn me onto their ‘lifestyle not diet’. Some claimed to have cured everything from IBS to eczema. One even claimed to have cured her cancer. They were all beautiful, slim and upper-middle class. They reminded me of the popular girls at uni who we called ‘the pretty but borings’. I didn’t see a huge amount of potential for a TV show. If we gave them a show, we’d be legitimising them.

‘I’ve got an idea for a show,’ I said. ‘It’s called debunk the junk and we’ll get them to cook their food for actual doctors and dieticians and tell them it’s all a bunch of NutriBullshit.’

Faye rolled her eyes.

‘Are you aware that all of these women have eating disorders?’ I said.

‘You can’t be sure of that, just ask yourself whether they’d make good telly.’

I was certain that none of them would make good telly. They might have the enthusiasm of children’s television presenters but their food looked revolting, and it didn’t contain enough calories to sustain a gnat. They talked about glowing through wan smiles while arranging ingredients in bowls and calling it cooking. They chastised foods they deemed to be ‘processed’. All food is processed, I thought to myself. Even stirring is a process.

I’ll admit, I am clearly not a doctor and it isn’t often I’m one to make armchair diagnoses, but I know what controlled eating looks like. What these women were doing might not have been as damaging as the girls at my school eating cotton wool and drinking bleach, but the mental arithmetic behind it is the same. They legitimised a problematic relationship with food and carried on the toxic message that thinness is aspirational.

My lifestyle kept me reasonably slim, although in less abstemious ways. I’d been living my life as a sufficiently functioning swamp demon for some time powered by wine, fags, Diet Coke and junk. I spent most of my weekend chasing a party, waking for long enough each day to eat a solitary pizza or an entire pot of hummus with a packet of pitta.

The only one of my 5 a day I regularly ingested was the grapes in wine. I was a mess and I knew I had to sort it out before my mother saw me and screamed, but I was living in East London in my twenties and my biggest motivation was fun.

At work I ate the same packed lunch every day, chucking in an obligatory salad leaf and an occasional Calippo to ward off scurvy. Liv couldn’t cook and I couldn’t be bothered so dinner was often liquid, or made up of two to three components from the M&S party food aisle. Pork in pastry hadn’t failed me yet and in the right light I could almost pull off a crop top. Life was good, and it would be all the better when I was a famous comedian.

Motivated more by fun than anything else, I started reading out the wellness witches’ Instagram captions to Faye in an exaggerated posh voice. There was a lot of talk about nourishing your body and being blessed. There were also a huge amount of ‘puddings’ made from vegetables: ‘avocado chocolate mousse’, ‘beetroot and sweet potato brownies’.

‘This is ludicrous!’ I harrumphed at Faye. ‘You should check their porridge against the price of gold.’

‘Just think about turning all those followers into viewers,’ she replied. My thoughts turned back to Lena, then I fell down a wellness hole.

‘What the fuck do they mean by “eat clean”?’ I carried on grumbling. ‘As if vegetables pulled from the literal mud are cleaner than a Snickers that comes out of a wrapper.’

‘Alright, Deliciously Bella, why don’t you start your own blog about the merits of drinking for three days straight before nourishing your body with eleven Domino’s and a vat of Ben & Jerry’s?’

I laughed it off. I already had a personal Instagram account. I’d only posted about seven times. Usually photos of dogs or beaches or my vast collection of Harry Potter socks. I had a couple of hundred followers and averaged around three likes per post. Posting made me feel anxious. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that anyone was really interested in my unremarkable life. As a distraction from reading yet another blog post about the benefits of nut butter, I started looking for online wellness parodies. I found a satirical yoga instructor called ‘Awaken with JP’, but I couldn’t find any evidence of women making a joke about wellness.

Maybe it could be funny. I thought. If people liked it, maybe I could persuade them to come and see my Edinburgh show. My only guaranteed audience thus far was my parents and their friends. It might be nice to see some people who weren’t wearing red trousers.

I searched the name Deliciously Bella and found the account already existed. A lady in Australia was busy documenting badly lit puddings, so I settled on Deliciously Stella instead. I uploaded a sweaty gym selfie and various photos of me lying prostrate on the sofa. I found a picture where I was covered head to toe in Domino’s boxes and smoking a fag. I captioned the photos as if I was a premier wellness guru using all of the wellness warriors’ hashtags. That should spice up their explore page, I thought. Then I got back to work.

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