Michelle Morand

CEDRIC Center founder Michelle Morand is a recovered compulsive eater and counsellor with over 15 years of experience in the field of recovery from eating disorders such as compulsive eating, anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, as well as causal factors such as depression, anxiety, and trauma.

Morand left home at the age of 15 to flee an abusive father. Already a master at using food to cope with stress, she became obsessed with body image and entered into the spiral of non-stop yo-yo dieting. She experimented with drugs, experienced several bouts of depression, and had numerous thoughts of suicide. She was convinced she was a bad person and was responsible for everyone else's pain. Anxiety mounted daily as her internal "Drill Sergeant" reinforced the negative self-talk that drove her to overeat. On the outside, she appeared happy. On the inside, she felt she would fall apart at any moment. Food gave her emotional comfort and something else to focus on when the "real world" seemed too much.

Luckily, she found her way to recovery in her early twenties with the help of a counsellor. "I remember that life-changing telephone conversation as if it happened yesterday," she says. Within the first session, she learned her childhood abuse experience was the key to her body image obsession, low self-esteem, and using food to cope. Now she counsels people of all ages on the same journey to recovery she made.

The CEDRIC Centre for Counselling, Inc., located in Victoria, BC, Canada, was created by Morand in 1999, to help people from all over the globe who suffer from a stressful relationship with food and body image. "I used food to cope. It could just as easily have been alcohol, shopping, gambling, drugs, or sexual addiction," she says.

Morand exudes a professional and supportive, caring nature. She counsels people onsite, as well as by phone and email. Ever passionate about her work, she says, "A person's health and quality of life suffers greatly when they use food as a coping strategy," adding "at The CEDRIC Centre, we know that food is not the problem. Until you identify and heal the underlying conce s that are triggering you to use food to cope, you will continue to depend on it to be your safe haven.