“Her techniques have proved successful where other methods have failed.” THE GUARDIAN
About Gillian Riley
Creating an online version of my course has been the most amazing challenge for me. I started out with the unshakable belief that I wasn’t the sort of person who could do face-to-camera delivery, and tried so many ways to gain confidence with that. It took me a while to realise there was really only one way to address this, and that was by running live webinars. The best part was that I knew the content inside and out, as at that point I had been teaching, coaching, researching and writing about this material for around 30 years.
You can see below what a webinar looks like on the screen. I present slides and respond to comments in the chat box, or those emailed to me from those who aren’t attending live. The interaction is crucial to me for many reasons; partly because I’ve been immersed in this material for so long I can lose sight of how radical it is – especially to long-term yo-yo dieters.
It’s very important to me to use everything I teach in my own life, and I enjoy ongoing benefits such as staying on top of systemic inflammation in general and arthritis in particular – and maintaining a loss of three dress sizes over decades. I fully intend to live through my later years as healthy as I can: free from chronic disease, pain and medication. I know what I eat is the major factor in this, both the quality of the food – and eating less of it.
To cut a (very!) long story short, I retuned to my home city of London in 1984, after living in the United States for 18 years. I established a stop-smoking programme, work I loved and thought I’d do for ever. But I became increasingly curious about the switch from smoking to overeating that so often troubled my clients. For many of them, it seemed that smoking wasn’t much more than a way to control eating and weight.
So in 1997 I began leading group courses on taking control of overeating, basing it on a lot of what I already knew about craving and impulse control. The first edition of my book EATING LESS was published by Random House UK (Vermilion) in 1999, after I had self-published it the previous year.
I moved to the countryside in the East Midlands, where I now live, in 2000, writing three more books and travelling to London to lead weekend workshops. More recently I launched EATING LESS ONLINE and ran my first webinar in January 2017.