Eating disorder counselling is therapy for anyone whose relationship with food, their body or their mind has become exhausting to live with. The inner noise, the rules, the binging, the restricting, the guilt. All of it takes up space, and all of it can be brought here. Therapy offers somewhere different to put it all down, even for an hour, and to begin making sense of it with someone alongside you.
I’m Mel, a BACP-registered counsellor working with adults across Falmouth, Truro and the wider Cornwall area, both in person and online. I specialise in supporting people who are navigating a difficult relationship with food, their body, their health, or the parts of themselves that feel hard to hold.
BACP Registered · £50 per session · In-person & Online
I work with adults who are struggling with their relationship with food, their body, or themselves. That might be a diagnosed eating disorder, or it might be binge eating, emotional eating, comfort eating, or a pattern of restricting and then giving in that you have never given a name to. It might be a long and complicated history with body image, or a quieter sense of feeling stuck, burnt out, anxious or a little lost.
Most people who come to me do not think of themselves as having an eating disorder. They just know that food has taken up more room in their head than they want it to, and that the eating has stopped feeling like something they choose.
My work often sits at the intersections of disordered eating, trauma, neurodivergence, addiction and the coping strategies that grow up around them. You do not need to arrive with the right words or have it all worked out. You can come exactly as you are; messy, complicated, uncertain. Showing up is enough of a start.
Eating disorders are far more common than most people realise. Beat, the UK’s eating disorder charity, estimates that around 3.5 million people in the UK are affected, roughly one in twenty. If you’d like to read a little before deciding what to do, Beat has clear information about the different types of eating disorder, and NICE publishes the national guidance on how they are recognised and treated.
I work in a person-centred, relational way, which means I don’t arrive with a plan for who you should become, or how quickly you should get there. You set the pace, and we work with whatever you bring, in whatever order feels right.
Something I’ve come to believe deeply is that acceptance and change aren’t opposites; they’re part of the same movement. When a person feels truly met, not despite the parts they find most difficult but including them, that’s often when something begins to shift. From that place, choice opens up in a way that pushing and white-knuckling rarely allows.
BACP Registered · £50 per session · In-person & Online
Somewhere you can bring all of you, unfiltered and unpolished, with nothing to perform and no progress to prove. Just room to be, and then to go from there.
Difficult patterns around food or coping usually make a kind of sense when we look at them honestly. They’ve been holding something, protecting something. We get curious about that together, rather than fighting it.
Weight-inclusive, non-diet, and affirming of neurodivergent, LGBTQ+ and open-relating lives. You won’t have to explain or defend who you are in order to be understood here.
Counselling isn’t my first way of caring for people. I trained and worked as a paramedic, and later took an MSc in Human Nutrition, spending several years working as a nutritionist before moving towards the slower, deeper work of therapy. Those worlds taught me a great deal about bodies, about being with people in hard moments, and about how much more there is to health than food and numbers.
That path shaped how I work now, especially around food and the body, and it sits behind my commitment to a non-diet, weight-inclusive approach. Away from the therapy room, I like to have some kind of creative outlet, I’ve a real eagerness for wonder and adventure, and an equal, if not bigger, love of doing absolutely nothing with a cuppa.
I hold a CPCAB Level 5 Diploma in Psychotherapeutic Counselling and I’m a Registered Member of the BACP (MBACP), working within their ethical framework. Alongside my counselling training, I hold a BSc (Hons) in Paramedic Practice and an MSc in Human Nutrition, both from the University of Plymouth, and I’m an HCPC-registered paramedic.
My continuing professional development includes training in applying intuitive eating and non-diet approaches in practice.
I see clients in person at two locations in Cornwall. In Penryn TR10 8AG, a couple of minutes from Falmouth, and at Lifetime Therapy, 77 Lemon Street, Truro, Cornwall TR1 2PN. I also work online, wherever you are. I work weekdays and some evenings, and sessions are £50 for 50 minutes.
I welcome people from across Falmouth, Penryn, Truro and the surrounding villages, including Mylor, Mabe, Constantine, Stithians and Perranarworthal. If travelling doesn’t suit you, or you’d simply prefer it, we can meet online.
To Contact Mel, please complete the following form.
Please do not include any private details in this form. If you are looking to book a session, Mel will contact you to arrange a convenient time for a free 15-minute consultation.
Sessions are £50 each and last 50 minutes. Before you commit to anything there is a free 15-minute consultation, so you can get a feel for whether we are a good fit. There is no obligation afterwards, and no charge at all if you decide to look elsewhere.
No. I work across the whole spectrum, from a diagnosed eating disorder to a complicated relationship with food, body or eating that has never had a label and never needed one. If it is taking up space in your life, it is worth bringing.
Yes. Binge eating rarely happens for no reason. It usually sits on top of something else, whether that is restriction, stress, loneliness or shame. We work on understanding what the bingeing has been holding for you, rather than trying to white-knuckle it into stopping.
The first step is a free 15-minute consultation — a low-pressure chance to talk about what’s bringing you, and to see whether we feel like a good fit before anything else.
There is no set number. Some people come for six or eight sessions to work through something specific; others stay for a year or more. We review it together as we go, and you are free to stop whenever you want to. You set the pace.
Yes. What you bring stays between us, with a small number of legal exceptions I will explain clearly at the start. I also discuss my work anonymously in regular supervision, which is a requirement of my BACP registration and helps keep the work safe and useful.
No. You can contact me directly and we can arrange a free consultation without involving anyone else. Some people choose to tell their GP they are starting counselling, particularly if their physical health is affected, but that is entirely your decision and not something I require.
It means I will not weigh you, set food rules, or treat weight loss as the goal. My work draws on intuitive eating and non-diet approaches, focusing on your relationship with food and your body rather than on changing your size. You are welcome exactly as you are.
Yes. I see clients in person in Penryn, a few minutes from Falmouth, and at 77 Lemon Street in Truro, and online across Cornwall and beyond. We can choose whichever feels most accessible, and change our minds later if it is not working.
I see clients in person at two locations: Penryn (TR10), a couple of minutes from Falmouth, and 77 Lemon Street in the centre of Truro (TR1). I also work online, so I see people from across Cornwall and further afield, including the surrounding villages.
That is genuinely fine, and the free consultation exists partly to find that out. If what you need sits outside what I can offer, I will say so and help point you towards specialist eating disorder services or another therapist. Nobody should be paying for the wrong support.
If you're in crisis or need support right now rather than in a few days, please use these urgent support numbers. Counselling isn't an emergency service, and there's no shame in needing something faster.
This page was last reviewed and updated in August 2026.