Author Archive

How To Get Free Of The Diet Mentality Part IX ©

Posted by mmorand on April 21, 2012

Hello! This is Part IX in our Diet Mentality series. Can you believe it!!? We’ve almost covered all the key points of the diet mentality and now you’ve got some clear and specific suggestions of what to do to change and let go completely of each of them. In case you’re new to our community you should know that my mission statement as an author/educator and counsellor is to ensure that anyone who wants to change their stressful relationship with food, regardless of where they live or their financial situation, gets the tools they need to step free! So this series is just another in a long line of articles, stemming back over 10 years, that I have written every week to provide you with tools and information to change your relationship with food. The CEDRIC Centre and our counselling and support team offer personalized healing retreats, individual counselling and group support, workshops, an interactive web based program and books, workbooks and many other resources like cd’s and video clips to help you step free completely from any stress around food and body image. (more…)

Tags: acceptance, natural eating, self care, self confidence, self love, self worth

Posted in: 2012, CEDRIC Centre, Natural Eating 101, Relationship with Food, Relationship with Others

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How To Get Free Of The Diet Mentality Part VIII ©

Posted by mmorand on April 13, 2012

Hello! This is Part VIII in our How to Get Free of the Diet Mentality series, (visit The CEDRIC Centre blog for immediate access to all articles in this series). If you’re new to our community, welcome! You’ll fit right in here if you are an emotional eater, or find that you binge, restrict, or struggle with anorexia, bulimia or some other stressful way of relating to food and want to learn how to stop. Last week I shared with you about what a diet mentality approach to exercise looks like and asked you to be on the lookout for it in your own approach to fitness/exercise and body image. This week I want to teach you about what a balance, life-enhancing and sustainable and, gasp… FUN, approach to exercise looks like. This is an approach you’ll enjoy so much you won’t even know you’re exercising! You’ll become one of those folks who just naturally enjoys moving their body and seeks to bring movement into their lives, not because they need to lose weight or feel crappy about their body, but because it’s fun and feels good. Really! (more…)

Tags: acceptance, all-or-nothing thinking, balance with food and exercise, balanced exercise, eating disorders, exercise, natural eating, recovery, self love, self worth

Posted in: 2012, CEDRIC Centre, The Diet Mentality Series

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How To Get Free Of The Diet Mentality Part VII ©

Posted by mmorand on April 6, 2012

Hello! This is Part VII of The Diet Mentality Series, (visit The CEDRIC Centre Blog for immediate access to all articles in this series). Welcome new members of our community! You’ll fit right in here if you are an emotional eater, binge, restrict, or struggle with anorexia, bulimia or some other stressful way of relating to food and want to learn how to stop. Over the past 2 months now we’ve been exploring in detail each of the key aspects of thinking and behaving that make up what we at CEDRIC call The Diet Mentality. Last week we covered the topic of weight and how our attachment to a certain size or weight impacts us. I asked you to contemplate a brief series of questions to do your own inner exploration of this topic and from the feedback I received you learned a lot! Good on ya! This week we are going to begin a little exploration on another of your favorite diet mentality topics: Exercise! Don’t ya just love it!!! (more…)

Tags: binge, bulimia, Chronic dieting, compulsive eating, diet mentality, eating disorder treatment, natural eating, purge, restricting, stress eating, yoyo dieting

Posted in: 2012, The Diet Mentality Series

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How To Get Free Of The Diet Mentality Part VI ©

Posted by mmorand on March 30, 2012

Hello! This is Part VI in our Diet Mentality series (visit The CEDRIC Centre blog for immediate access to all articles in this series). If you’re new to our community, welcome! You’ll fit right in here if you are an emotional eater, find that you binge, restrict, or struggle with anorexia, bulimia or some other stressful way of relating to food and want to learn how to stop. All righty! In the past few weeks we’ve covered:

The perils of both just arbitrarily restricting the amount of food you’re “allowed” to have regardless of your true hunger levels; and
Of feeling obligated to eat what is placed in front of you – whether or not you like it and whether or not it is too much.
We’ve also addressed the stress of labeling foods as good/bad legal/illegal and the nasty consequences of doing so.
And we’ve talked about what happens when we get stuck in rules about when we can eat rather than just listening to our body’s natural cues of hunger and fullness.
My last article discussed the biggie of engaging in all or nothing thinking regarding food and meals.

This week we’re going to explore the topic you love to hate: Your weight! In the diet mentality perspective on life your weight is the central focus of your life. You base decisions about what you can have, do and be on how much weight you have lost or gained. Therefore, if you have gained a bit you feel deserving of punishment and will attempt to restrict yourself or isolate yourself. If you have lost weight you feel more deserving of “treats” and feel more positive self-regard. The truth is, once your self-esteem becomes attached to a number on a scale or a particular pant size you’re in big trouble. This is because now you’re attaching all your worth to one thing which makes any human obsessed about that one thing, which means we get in there and micro-manage that one thing and pretty soon we forget how to just be normal and natural and let our body do what it naturally does (eat when hungry, stop when full and be a natural healthy weight without effort). (more…)

Tags: all-or-nothing thinking, Chronic dieting, compulsive eating, dieting, eating disorder treatment, eating disorders, how much you weight, overweight, restricting food, self esteem, self love, self worth, the diet mentality, triggers

Posted in: 2012, Relationship with Food, The Diet Mentality Series

Basic Statistics on Dieting Video

Posted by mmorand on March 24, 2012

Basic Statistics on Dieting Video and Why it so Rarely Works for Anyone.

This video will quickly provide you with some interesting Basic Statistics on Dieting, including how they can lead to eating disorders for our Video Blog.

Some of them will surprise you, others will be familiar. All of them will help you to understand why you’ve struggled with dieting and weight loss and body image.

Dieting for anything other than health reasons and from any mental attitude other than self-esteem and good self-care will fail. This is because if you’re not thinking about your long term health and overall self-esteem you will engage in diets that are extreme and therefore cannot be sustained for any length of time.

What we really need if we want to be successful in weight loss and in creating a relationship with food that makes us feel good mentally and physically is an approach to food and to self-care that comes first from trusting the cues that your body is sending you about how you feel and what that means about what you need.

In essence, good self-esteem is required before any change to a pattern in your life can be lasting. And good self-esteem comes from you taking the time to listen to how you feel emotionally and physically and responding respectfully and reasonably to those emotions and sensations. If you learn to do this – and it isn’t hard – you will have no problems with overeating, emotional eating, binging, eating disorders or weight loss ever again.

I know this from personal experience and I’ve seen it time and time again in my 20+ years as a counselling specialist helping people to stop binging and lose weight. It’s the same for those who struggle with anorexia or bulimia or other forms of restriction and confused relating to food.

Figure out what’s getting in the way of you feeling worthy of good self-care and worthy of love and acceptance from others, as you are and you’ll be your best, sexy, happenin’ self before you know it.

It isn’t hard, it doesn’t have to take long – you just need a good teacher and solid, simple, clear tools.

I can help. mmorand@cedriccentre.com email me and we can talk about how things are going for you and what you can do to quickly and simply get a grip on food and weight for good.

Michelle

Once you’ve learned about the basic statistics on dieting, click on this link to purchase the full video or reach out to Michelle for an individual session or for more information on the best approach for you to completely step free for good from your stressful relationship with food and weight loss.

Just click on the image to hear a few minutes of an excerpt from Michelle’s presentation of ‘Sidestepping the Food Emotion Power Struggle’

Tags: anorexia, binge eating, bulimia, Chronic dieting, compulsive eating, dieting, eating disorder clinics, eating disorder treatment, eating disorders, overeating, rebalancing, recovery, self care, the diet mentality

Posted in: 2012, CEDRIC Centre, Relationship with Self, The Diet Mentality Series

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The Diet Mentality Vs. Natural Eating – Podcast Format

Posted by mmorand on March 17, 2012

The Diet Mentality vs. Natural Eating

For this week’s blog, we have a Podcast recorded by Michelle, in which she examines the dynamics of the Diet Mentality Vs. Natural Eating.

We’ve added a snippet of a written article on the subject of the Diet Mentality Vs. Natural Eating below – if you’d prefer to read just click on the article link and get access to a whole series of articles on the topic and tools for what to do to change your frustrating relationship with food for good.

If you’d like to listen to the podcast, just click on the image to hear a few minutes of Michelle explaining the importance of changing your way of thinking if you have been stuck in The Diet Mentality vs. Natural Eating, and to start listening more to your body instead of what some diet is telling you to eat and when to eat it, and more during the 11 minutes. Enjoy!

Article Snippet:

Natural Eating 101 The Diet Mentality vs. Natural Eating

When you eat naturally, your body comes to its natural weight without rigorous exercise programs and without dieting or restricting. And it stays there.

With natural eating, you can have any amount of any food(s) around you at any time and you don’t feel the slightest urge to overeat/binge. You can have a cupboard full of your “bad” or “trigger” or “binge” foods and forget all about them; so much so that they go bad and you have to throw them out! Truly. I have experienced this transformation myself and I have heard this very same statement from hundreds of clients who now live natural eating every day. If your relationship with food is not that, you’ve definitely come to the right place and you are definitely ready for the CEDRIC Method.

This week we are going to talk about The Diet Mentality. The following checklist is your own personal assessment tool to discern whether you have The Diet Mentality. Whether you engage in formal dieting (follow a program of some kind) or just don’t allow yourself to have certain foods because you need to lose weight, you are in The Diet Mentality. If you’ve been engaging in either of those approaches for more than 2 weeks, you will have already begun to lose your trust in your body’s signals of hunger and fullness and feel less comfortable just being around food and in your body. It’s ironic that this Diet Mentality that is meant to help us lose weight and feel better often sets us very quickly on a treadmill of food and weight preoccupation that can be very hard to get off of without support and guidance.

So, if this topic hits home with you at all and you’d like your relationship with food and your weight to feel more secure and confident and peaceful, I encourage you to stay tuned as we explore the key tools and information you need to step out of The Diet Mentality completely and forever and live in that peaceful place we call Natural Eating.

The following is a handout that I give to most of my clients as it helps them to identify certain ways of thinking and behaving that they may just think are normal or even a part of who they are but which are actually learned thoughts and behaviours that are a part of the harmful Diet Mentality.

Tags: binge eating, bulimia, Chronic dieting, compulsive eating, dieting, eating disorder clinics, eating disorders, healthy eating, natural eating, overeating, purging, rebalancing, the diet mentality

Posted in: 2012, Natural Eating 101, The Diet Mentality Series, Tips for Natural Eating

The Drill Sergeant Dialogue – Video Format

Posted by mmorand on March 10, 2012

This week we instead of bringing you Michelle’s message in print, we are introducing our CEDRIC Video Blog. Please click on the image provided to hear a few minutes of Michelle explaining the importance of the ‘Drill Sergeant’ and some steps to take to retrain your thinking and have an immediate and powerful influence on your behaviour. I chose the ‘Drill Sergeant Dialogue’ to kick off our monthly video series because it is such an important concept to grasp. Self-esteem is one of the very biggest areas to work on for complete recovery from your stressful relationship with food. It is the solid foundation from which the rest of our life practically falls into place. Just recognizing the dynamic of the ‘Drill Sergeant’ dialogue is helpful and I thought this clip explained it well. After you watch it, you may find just having a quick flashback to Michelle encouraging you to deal with your D.S in a different way will help you adjust your thinking that much faster when you are being down on yourself. After absorbing the material at the weekend workshop myself, I practiced the process of rephrasing things to be more positive and encouraging and now when I want to quickly zap myself into coming from a positive place of love, patience, understanding with lots of great options in front of me, I just say “Be Kind.” Then I can quickly remember to adjust my thinking to override the negative thoughts. It really does work if you practice the correct phrasing to play in your head to replace the negative stuff that is hindering you on so many levels. After all positive breeds positive and vice versa. So do whatever you can to stay in the positive, even if it feels like just a baby step! Have a watch of the video and then really get to know your own ‘Drill Sergeant’ so you can integrate that well-meaning but confused aspect of yourself and truly support yourself in ways that are kinder, more patient, forgiving and encouraging. If you want to read more about the ‘Drill Sergeant’ just search that term on our blog and you’ll find lots of great articles that help you to change the way you relate to yourself. From there it’s a hop, skip and a jump to forever changing the way you related to food. Enjoy the Video Clip! You can see more clips at CEDRIC’s YouTube Channel Janice

Tags: "Drill Sargent Dialogue" dieting "restricting food" "binging and purging" self-compassion self-esteem self-criticism "chronic dieting" overeating "compulsive eating" bulimia anorexia "stress eating", all-or-nothing thinking, core beliefs, eating disorder treatment, overeating, recovery, self care, triggers

Posted in: 2012, All-or-Nothing Thinking, CEDRIC Centre

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How To Get Free Of The Diet Mentality Part V ©

Posted by mmorand on March 3, 2012

Hello! This is Part V in our Diet Mentality series (visit The CEDRIC Centre blog for immediate access to all articles in this series). If you’re new to our community, welcome! You’ll fit right in here if you are an emotional eater, find that you binge, restrict, or struggle with anorexia, bulimia or some other stressful way of relating to food and want to learn how to stop. All righty! In the past few weeks we’ve covered:

The perils of both just arbitrarily restricting the amount of food you’re “allowed” to have regardless of your true hunger levels; and
Of feeling obligated to eat what is placed in front of you – whether or not you like it and whether or not it is too much.
We’ve also addressed the stress of labeling foods as good/bad legal/illegal and the nasty consequences of doing so.
And last week we talked about what happens when we get stuck in rules about when we can eat rather than just listening to our body’s natural cues of hunger and fullness.

Whew! We’ve covered a lot already and we’re only about half-way through the key characteristics of The Diet Mentality. No wonder it’s such a quagmire and that we need guidance and support to find our way out! That’s what my team and I are here for. So read on and take another step toward the light. This week’s Diet Mentality trait is a BIGGY! You engage in all or nothing thinking regarding food and meals. Meaning: You set strict goals and guidelines for yourself and if you waver from them at all or miss a step/day/meal you feel like a failure and make harsh judgements about your lack of willpower and inability to follow a plan. (more…)

Tags: acceptance, all-or-nothing thinking, anorexia, anxiety, binge and purge, binge eating, Chronic dieting, compulsive eating, eating disorder treatment, emotional eating, natural eating, rebalancing, self esteem, self-judgement, triggers to use food to cope, unreasonable expectations

Posted in: 2012, All-or-Nothing Thinking, CEDRIC Centre, The Diet Mentality Series, Tips for Natural Eating

Calgary Health Show 2012

Posted by mmorand on February 28, 2012

Click for a a few minutes of Michelle presenting ‘Sidestepping The Food – Emotion Power Struggle’ recorded at the The Victoria Health Show, Feb. 29th, 2012.

Michelle Morand, will be a featured speaker at the Calgary Annual Health Show, March 18th, 2012 – 2:35 pm to 3:25 pm, presenting:

‘Sidestepping The Food – Emotion Power Struggle’

She explains the underlying reasons why we use food or restricting to cope, both from a chemical and psychological point of view, and provides steps to set your self up to have a stress free relationship with food. The knowledge you gain is very empowering on many levels, particularly when you realize what is driving many negative coping strategies, not just your issues with food.

This talk is for anyone whose relationship with food is stressful and whose weight is not where they would like it to be. Michelle shows you how to begin to have a healthy relationship with food and how to maintain a natural weight for your body, for life, without dieting and rigorous exercise regimes. You can’t be healthy, let alone happy and secure in your life if you are stuck focusing on what you ate and what you weigh. Join Michelle and learn why you struggle with food, what is really triggering the frustrating way you think and behave, and what steps to take to achieve long lasting change, create peace in your mind and feel more confident in your own skin

Venue: The Annual Calgary Health Show, Big Four – Hall A – Stampede Park.

Cost: Free once you pay the $5.00 admission for 1 day or $7.50 for both Sat. and Sun. Children under 12 are free.

Show Hours: Sat. March 17th – 10:00 am to 6:00 pm; Sun. March 18th – 11:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Michelle’s Talk: Sun. March 18th from 2:35 pm to 3:25 pm.

Come visit our booth, meet Michelle and gather some information on how we may help you.

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Join Michelle on Sun. Jan. 29th at the Victoria Total Health Show where she will be a featured speaker at 3:40 to 4:30 p.m. Michelle’s topic will be: Sidestepping the Food – Emotion Power Struggle’.

If your relationship with food is at all stressful and your weight is not where you’d like it to be, you must attend this presentation by CEDRIC Centre founder Michelle Morand. In one hour Michelle will show you how to begin to have a healthy relationship with food and how to maintain a natural weight for your body, for life, without dieting and exercise regimes. You can’t be healthy, let alone happy and secure in your life if you are stuck focusing on what you ate and what you weigh. So, if you are at all frustrated with the amount of time you spend thinking about what you are eating or how much you weigh, come and learn some simple steps to break free from the food – emotion power struggle.

You can catch Michelle at her booth as well as speaking about ‘Sidestepping the Food- Emotion Power Struggle’ at 3:00 p.m. at the upcoming Vancouver Health Show, Oct. 29th and 30th, at the Vancouver Convention Centre, East Facility – Hall B, Sat -10 am to 6 pm and Sun. 11 am to 5 pm.