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Inspired by Carr, Woodward became vegan and made her diet gluten, dairy and sugar free. 'The problem was that I hated fruit and vegetables,' she says. 'I was a complete sugar monster and I didn't know how to cook,' she says, laughing. 'So the next morning after making this resolution, I was pretty nervous. I didn't know the first thing about healthy food.'

She started by eating porridge with blueberries and bananas for breakfast ('I would add the fruit in at the start so it would dissolve because I hated fruit that much, but actually it makes it taste better because it absorbs into the oats at the start'), buckwheat bread with avocado for lunch and brown rice pasta and vegetables for dinner. 'I ate the same thing for six weeks, which was incredibly boring,' she says. 'I was starting to feel better – nothing dramatic, I just had a little bit more energy and felt a bit less horrible every day. But I knew the diet wasn't going to be sustainable if I didn't enjoy it. It's not fun eating the same thing every day.'

A friend suggested she keep a blog as a place to share new recipes. 'The first recipes were so simple,' she says. 'Things like mashed avocado with lime and sweet potato-wedges with cinnamon. But I was teaching myself about flavour combinations.' After she had created 20 recipes she showed her blog to her friends and her boyfriend, Felix. 'He was really surprised. He said, "But you can't cook." I had to say, "Well, actually, I can now." '

Even though she had no experience, Woodward says she found creating recipes easy. 'Once I had a base of things I knew how to do, I could add in more flavours. When I started doing this I was so ill that all I was doing was cooking, all day every day. There was lots of time to practise.' The day she made her pancake recipe her flatmates decided to stay at home to help her experiment. 'We tested it and tested it until we got it right – the cinnamon was the key. I think we ate about 40 or 50 pancakes that day.'

So far nothing has gone terribly wrong with the recipes, save for a mango pudding that wouldn't set and a chocolate roulade (cacao powder replaces the chocolate and Woodward uses buckwheat or brown rice flour) that refused to roll. 'I'm waiting for my first big disaster,' she says, laughing. 'You can add things to savoury dishes as you cook, but sweet dishes are more challenging.' One of her most popular posts is her recipe for sweet-potato brownies. 'They were a complete fluke,' she says. 'I was going to a dinner party and had forgotten that I had said I would bring something. All I had was sweet potato, dates and some store-cupboard ingredients. I whizzed these together and everyone loved them.'

_{Watch Ella make her sweet potato brownies}

The trick to her new diet, she says, is to embrace the difference between this kind of cooking and normal cooking. 'I don't [understand] people who try to make tofu steaks or vegan sausages – they'll always be horrible,' she says. 'And if you're doing gluten-free baking, you have to accept the fact that it will be denser because of the properties of the gluten-free flour.'

After six months of her new regime, she says, she felt 'significantly better'. 'I was able to walk to the supermarket instead of getting online deliveries, which sounds pathetic but was actually really empowering. For the first time in ages I was doing something for myself rather than relying on other people or drugs I didn't really understand.' She graduated in June, moved back home to London and, as her interest in nutrition has increased, has been training as a naturopathic nutritionist at the College of Naturopathic Medicine since September.

Meanwhile her blog, Deliciously Ella, has attracted a cult-like following (she takes all the photographs herself, and the photographer Tommy Clarke makes the videos). Last month she had 800,000 hits, and is inundated with responses. 'I had a comment from a young girl from Vancouver with eating disorders saying it was the first time she'd cooked in three years. I cried. It's crazy to think my blog is being read by people around the world.' Woodward launched an app this month (it went to number one overnight in food and drink in the app store in both Britain and America), and she is working on a book, which will be published in January next year. She also runs twice-monthly cookery classes at a rented kitchen in east London.

Her friends have been supportive. 'My girlfriends send me SnapChat pictures of things they've made. And because I'm doing recipes for the book at the moment I have people over every night to taste test them. It's so much more fun for me if other people embrace it.' She is slowly converting those around her. Her mother and younger sister are now vegetarian and almost '80 per cent gluten free'; her brother does two vegetarian days a week, and Felix, 'who is very into meat, now loves vegan food from time to time.' Which, she says, is the perfect way to enjoy her diet. 'It is hard to eat this way,' she admits, 'and I wouldn't be so strict if it weren't for my health. I think the ideal balance is to eat this way about 80 per cent of the time.'

In September Woodward came off the drugs entirely. Four months on she says she feels 'amazing', although she warns, 'I do still have to be careful. It's an illness that doesn't leave you and I feel like I'm in remission.' None the less her doctors are so impressed that they are trying to set up trials based on her diet for other sufferers. 'It's so exciting and liberating to be free of it [the symptoms]. During the worst moments, I just didn't think that would happen.'

Recipes from Deliciously Ella

Healthy recipes: sweet potato brownies

Healthy recipes: gluten-free almond, quinoa and pumpkin-seed bread

Healthy recipes: sun-dried tomato, aubergine and pine-nut pasta

Healthy recipes: gluten-free banana pancakes

Healthy recipes: hazelnut chocolate spread

Healthy recipes: courgette noodles with minted avocado sauce

deliciouslyella.com