My husband and I have been loyal customers of gym chain LA Fitness for six years. I am seven months pregnant, we are moving 12 miles away from the gym and don't drive. My husband has lost his job and we are now on benefits. We can barely feed our children right now and can't afford the two-year contract.

Despite us sending LA Fitness a letter proving my husband has been let go from his job, his employer didn't use the word "redundant" in the letter, so LA Fitness will not accept it as a valid reason to terminate the contract. I have been told that being pregnant entitles me only to temporarily freeze my membership. Moving away does not apply, as we need to be 20 miles from the nearest gym to cancel. We just cannot pay. HB, Billericay, Essex

This has to be one of the most distressing cases we have dealt with. By the time we managed to get you some sort of answer, you were about to be made homeless because your landlady wanted the property back and the home you were due to move into had fallen through. You were due to give birth in four weeks, and your husband was still out of a job.

Initially, we approached LA Fitness pleading on grounds of compassion, but it would not budge. It was sticking to the letter of its contract and would not look beyond this. We then talked to the Office of Fair Trading. Although it will not comment on individual cases, it directed us to a ruling recently made in the high court about a gym management company, Ashbourne. The court ruled that some of Ashbourne's small-print terms for thousands of gym membership contracts were unfair and therefore unenforceable – a ruling that could, in theory, be applied to other gym contracts.

We talked to the lawyers at Which?, who suggested you could reasonably rely on paragraph 174 of the Ashbourne ruling, in which Mr Justice Kitchin stated that gym agreements that set minimum membership periods of 12, 24 or 36 months are "so weighted as to cause a significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations in a manner and to an extent which is contrary to good faith".

You could argue that the length of the contract you signed with LA Fitness – 24 months – was worded to cause "a significant imbalance" between yourself and the gym.

Understandably, you and your husband feel you do not have the energy to go to court over this. After much pushing by us, LA Fitness eventually agreed to come to a compromise and will charge you only for a further six months of the contract. This has saved you £420 but means you are still liable to pay £360. You say you don't know how you will pay it, but have agreed to the compromise because you don't feel you have a choice.

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