Conclusion: I still don't think bread is the enemy

My desire to start this blog was mainly driven by my anger at being told that in order to be healthy I needed to abandon bread. Frankly, that was never going to happen. So, instead, I chose the less daunting option of thoroughly researching the history of diet culture and of analysing diet books from a literary perspective in order to prove that sentiment wrong. I'm happy to say that it worked: As I write this post I'm enjoying some toast with Marmite.

Viewing the Deliciously Ella franchise through the lens of literature has helped me to understand exactly what it is that makes the clean eating movement, and diets in general, so enticing and lucrative. It's highlighted to me the various ways in which Ella's books are exactly like those of her diet forefathers, as well as the ways in which they vary just enough to convince people they aren't!

Let's get one thing clear: Clean eating is a diet. The Deliciously Ella books are diet books. Just like the rest of them, they encourage their readers to abandon all that they thought they knew about food, as evidenced by everything I symbolically threw away in my first post! They are marketed at women and tell them that living "the Deliciously Ella way" is the final solution to their eating woes. And, of course, they are selling a lifestyle full of joy and simplicity, much like the diet books that hit best-sellers lists before them. However, social media has revolutionised the reader-writer relationship just enough to convince us that Ella is not a diet guru, but a friend. It's meant that all of her books can be directly written to those that frequently comment on her Instagram posts, making her seem likeable and relateble. Simultaneously, her social media posts keep her content constantly relevant and, as such, make her clean eating principles harder to push to the back of the bookshelf and forget about. Essentially, her books and online presence combine to make a dieting super-power that is an exaggerated version of just about every diet craze throughout history. 

The research I've done has solidified for me that Deliciously Ella is nothing new and is just diet culture is new packaging. I'm sure there's bound to be a new-born health trend biting at its heels in no time. So, no, I won't be cutting bread out of my diet. I'll continue to think of it very much as a friend.