Award winning hairdresser Paul Stafford (38) lost 30lb after he joined a gym and invested in sessions with a personal trainer. he lives in belfast with his wife and business partner Leisa (38) and their two daughters Joni (6) and Ava (4). he says

After my family, my health is the most important thing to me. It wasn't really until my wife Leisa and I started talking about having a family that I began thinking about my health and the future. If I was going to be a father I wanted to be around to play with my kids and watch them grow old.

My late father Stanley always suffered from ill health and I realised from an early age that he wasn't able to do the things other dads did, like play with us and so on. He was in a very bad car accident when I was a young boy which resulted in him spending over a year in hospital. It took him a long time to recover from his injuries and he had a lot of health problems after that. His quality of life deteriorated into nothing and he passed away last year.

I was in my late 20s when I noticed that I was putting on a lot more weight than I should. It was all down to the kind of lifestyle I was living. The industry I'm in is very sociable and Leisa and I would've been out quite a few nights during the week until all hours in nightclubs and then going into work the next day ... then doing it all at the weekend again.

I was very big into eating out and having a few glasses of wine. I would be the type of person that if a bottle is opened it has to be finished. I'm more conscious of my alcohol intake now because I know it would be very easy for one drink to turn into more than that. Leisa would always have been more disciplined in that respect.

My clothes weren't fitting me properly but that didn't stop me wearing them, I just looked stupid trying to fit into them. As my weight increased I began to wear looser clothes, anything that fitted really. They were quite casual and weren't in keeping with my job. Hairdressing is all about image, about making your clientele look and feel good. Dressing like a slob made me look like I didn't care about my image, it was giving out the wrong signals and I was very aware of that. I was living a questionable lifestyle and there was no way I could have gone on like that forever.

When we started talking about having kids, I knew I had to take stock and make changes. I spoke to a personal trainer called Glen Wilkinson. I already knew of him as he's also a model. I told him I wanted to lose weight and get fit. He told me to stop eating, stop drinking and start training three times a week, which I couldn't fit into the lifestyle I was leading then. It was obvious that something had to give and I had to make sure that I did fit it in.

Before I began looking after myself properly, when I went into work in the morning after being out until all hours, I needed five or six strong coffees before I came round. It never affected my job because I'm a perfectionist and everything has to be right. But I'm sure I was very grumpy, not very pleasant, and maybe snapped at the staff as well. I think I'm a much nicer person to be around.

I'm currently at my ideal weight, 11st 5lb, and when I was at my heaviest I was 13 st 7lb.

When I started training I began to feel a lot better about myself, my lifestyle and my general health. I paid more attention to what I was putting into my body in terms of food and drink. I allow myself a takeaway or dine out at the weekend and I look forward to it, but during the week I'm very careful and never eat fast food.

Glen trained me up to a run the Belfast marathon in 2002. To be able to reach that level of fitness was an unbelievable achievement - I had reached my target and achieved a personal goal. This year, I ran the marathon as part of the Peak Physique gym's relay team and I did my leg in just over 45 minutes.

I do different workouts each day and if it's a running day, I'm up at 5.45am and off for a run. The gym doesn't open until 6.30am - if it opened any earlier I'd be there. If I have to travel to London because of work or a hairdressing show, I wouldn't stay in a hotel that didn't have a gym. If I'm on holiday, I still fit in sessions as I'm going to be eating and drinking more.

I'm not a very good sleeper so I decided that I would do my workout in the morning. My trainer wasn't always available so early in the morning when I felt like working out which meant that if I wanted to go for a run I had to pull myself out of bed and motivate myself. It's important to have quality time and working out is my way of doing that.

To me, by having a personal trainer I'm investing in the future. I'm doing it so that my children will have a dad to share their future with. My advice to anyone that lacks self-motivation is pay someone to help you. A personal trainer can advise you on your diet, what training suits you, what your limitations are and set realistic goals.

Accept the skin you're born with and don't strive to be something you're not. I'm a 5ft 6in Anglo Saxon - I'm never going to be Brad Pitt.

At the weekend, I would certainly go out for a few drinks and on a Saturday night Leisa and I always go out for a meal, but it's very hard to get up at 6am for a run when you've had a few. You certainly feel it the next day. Besides, I work in the salon on a Saturday and I need to be able to do a day's work.

I now train with Ekrem Babat from Peak Physique gym on the Lisburn Road, and we are concentrating on keeping me fit for life. The emphasis is on maintaining a healthy heart, lungs and muscles to keep me fit through to my 80s or older. "

When Michelin star chef Michael Deane's weight crept up to 16st and remained there, he knew he had to do something about it before his unhealthy lifestyle spiralled out of control. michael, (46) who lives in Belfast with his wife, former TV presenter Kate Smith and their son Marco (7), says

If you don't have your health, every aspect of your life is finished. You can't enjoy what you worked all your life to achieve - maybe when you get a bit older, you do get wiser and realise that you need to look after yourself.

What's the point of working hard all your life to provide yourself, and your family, with a sense of security when it leaves you overweight and unhealthy? If I was to make a choice between my businesses and my health, it would be my health - I'd rather have nothing and be 12st.

I think the one thing a lot of people regret when they get older is not taking care of themselves when they were young.

My wife, Kate, does a bit of training to keep fit. She cycles quite a bit and she takes our son Marco out, too. He's a very healthy wee boy. I started teaching Marco to swim, although he has had lessons as well.

When I was at school, I was more athletic and swam a lot. In my 20s, I did attend a gym but it's very hard to find time to go regularly and to get into a strict routine when you're working a 60 to 70-hour week starting in the kitchen at 7am and not getting home until nearly midnight. Work took over. Being a chef is quite an active job, you're always on the go. At the same time, I'm always sampling as I go along.

I might have eaten two or three proper meals in a week as I was always snacking on food, but when it came to meal times I wasn't always hungry.

The weight crept up and although I knew I wasn't my proper weight I didn't do anything about it until I got on the wrong side of 40 - that's when I started thinking about sorting it out before I put on any more. I was 16 stone and had been for quite some time.

Food and drink is something I take pleasure in so it would have been very easy for me to put on another stone and keep going.

I was having a drink with Paul Stafford, the hairdresser, one night and he was telling me all about his personal trainer and his workouts. He knew that I wanted to do something about my weight and was very encouraging. He said, 'You don't want to keep on getting heavy' and he was right. Sometimes it takes someone else to point it out to you.

By the time I was 45, I'd reached the point where I was either going to have a heart attack or end up with a serious health problem.

Losing weight is easy to do if you really push at it. I couldn't do it by myself, although some people can.

I started six months ago with David Hanna, who trains me at the Holiday Inn's Spirit gym in Belfast. He's given me a homework book which is basically a training diary with my workouts planned in advance for the week ahead so I can fit it around my work.

When I first got on the treadmill I was a sight, was hobbling all over the show, and I had very bad posture from all my years spent bent over fridges, freezers and cookers. I couldn't run and my legs were very weak so we concentrated on strengthening them first.

Now, I feel confident - not absolutely knackered. I'm lifting four or five times the weight that I was when I started out. I train six days with one rest day during week one and then five days with two rest days the next week.

I don't eat complex carbohydrates after 2pm in the day - I eat no pasta, rice or potatoes and I've upped my protein intake.

I stopped smoking about 10 years ago - I don't know why I ever smoked and I don't know why other people do it either. I only started smoking when I was younger because everyone else was doing it and I ended up smoking 40-50 a day. I had to stop because I couldn't breathe.

People say that you start eating more when you stop smoking and maybe that contributed to my weight.

Eating habits here are improving. However, food portions are still quite big and it's unnecessary. People seem to associate large helpings with having a good meal and that's not necessarily the case. They might order a portion of lasagne with chips or creamed potatoes and then have a salad or diet Coke along with it thinking that will balance it out, but it won't.

In the Mediterranean, the weather is better and people are more active; they eat more olive oil, fresh fish and so on. They don't eat mountains of food like we do here. They eat in smaller quantities and take longer over their meals.

Since starting my training I've taken on more business projects with Deane's at Queen's opening at Queen's University Students' Union and also, my first restaurant outside Belfast, Simply Deane's at The Outlet retail centre, near Banbridge.

As I said, sometimes you just need a push and it's important to make the changes in your life before it's too late."