Despite being a woman, I gained weight like many men do. I was a beer drinker - a big one. I wanted to lose weight, but I couldn't face the idea of ordering a mineral water in a pub when everyone else was having a pint.

I'd have a busy weekend, generally based around eating out, drinking out, maybe an afternoon at a rugby match. What I didn't ever do was get up on a Sunday morning and play football like my friends did. I'd watch - but I wasn't burning the energy they were.

Eventually I was very overweight, and I couldn't walk up my own stairs without stopping to take my inhaler. It was time to change.

I started losing weight, eventually with the help of a group, and within 18 months I'd lost 8 stone (112lb, 51kg) I learned how to lose weight (and more importantly inches) without losing my lifestyle, my friends or my character.

I'd tried to lose weight a hundred times before, I could have wallpapered my house with the diet magazines and books I'd bought. What was different this time was that I stopped myself from feeling so guilty about liking eating and drinking. I stopped thinking that I could lose weight really quickly, which was always a problem before - if I didn't see results immediately I gave up. I decided that I needed to find a way of losing weight that meant that I made the changes that I was prepared to, but where I wasn't forced to change everything. I started to do it myself, but found that I needed the discipline of a set time to weigh myself every week, so I found a slimming club to attend.

I was never an angel (angel isn't a word often associated with me!) and I still had a drink and ate out, possibly a bit too much. But I made a decision that I'd rather lose weight slightly more slowly while enjoying my life than be a hermit. I knew if I was too strict I'd give up after a week or two, and that if I was really going to lose the weight and keep it off it was going to have to be with changes I could stick to long term.

The group that I went to was fantastic and there were a lot of great people there to support each other and a leader who had been there and done it. I ended up losing my weight and working for the company, running a big group for five years.

I noticed that while a lot of my most successful members were men, my group was mostly made up of women. Men would tell me that they wanted the support of a group and a person who had been there, but they didn't want to sit in a circle and talk about things publicly. They were also very anti weighing their food - one told me that if I told him he had to weigh out some turkey he'd walk out immediately.

Eventually, having passed my group on to someone else, it occurred to me that men should have their own weight loss plan, with no weighing or measuring food and where they could get the support of someone who'd been there and done it and a group of others doing the same as them, but without the commitment of having to attend a weekly group. And so Beltdown.com was born.

With support from me and a small group of colleagues who have all lost significant weight themselves, a plan that fits in with your lifestyle and a group of people that you can access online for ideas and support, it'll be the best £8 a month you spend.