For decades, my obsession with diets made me an absent mum. At 52, I finally got in shape without Ozempic or surgery – but I’ll always regret the damage I did to my kids

In the dead of night, Alison Weihe got out of her warm bed.

The mother-of-two tiptoed past her children’s bedrooms to ensure she didn’t disturb them and silently snuck into the kitchen. 

Her stomach was rumbling.  

Earlier that evening, she’d barely touched the dinner she’d prepared for the family and instead kept herself busy cleaning and chatting while everyone else tucked in. 

‘I’m on a diet,’ she told herself.

But now, in the early hours of the morning, the then-40-year-old wrenched open the fridge door and began to stuff her face with food. 

It was a pattern she knew only too well. 

‘To me food wasn’t fuel, it was the enemy,’ Alison, now-66, from Johannesburg, South Africa, tells Daily Mail Australia.

In her 50s, Alison was still struggling with the disordered eating she’d been suffering with since she was just eight years old

‘I was constantly battling with food for decades. I wasn’t overweight, but I wasn’t slim either.’

The battle began for Alison when she was just eight years old. 

She felt like the ‘odd one out’ growing up in a sporty household and ‘wanted to be invisible’ because she felt different. 

‘My siblings were always out playing sport whereas I was a very sensitive, quiet, and gentle,’ she says. 

As well as feeling isolated from her siblings, Alison had struggles with her parents. Her father was suffering with bipolar disorder, although there wasn’t a name for the diagnosis at the time.

‘He would have these manic ups and downs and drive away, tyres screeching into the night, saying he’s going to commit suicide,’ Alison says.

‘I started emotional eating as a way of numbing myself. I was like an invisible child. It set in motion of pattern for the next 50 years.’ 

Alison’s anxiety, depression and comfort eating followed her into her twenties – and only got worse when she began to attempt extreme diets to lose weight.

Alison now exercises regularly, running and doing Pilates. She eats a mostly vegetarian diet, consisting of lots of fruit, vegetables and eggs 

At 52 Alison hit ‘rock bottom’ after her business fell apart due to a fraud scandal where $1.3million USD ($2million AUD) was lost. The financial strain put pressure on her marriage too

‘When I was 24 I went to the doctor and started a radical extreme diet. I just wanted to be thin,’ Alison says. 

She started following a very low calorie diet, weighing and measuring every ingredient, becoming completely obsessive.

‘I tried so hard to maintain the weight and would take laxatives, I’d do anything to lower the needle on the scale,’ she says.

This obsession developed into an eating disorder, where Alison would binge, then purge.

Alison’s weight was up and down like a yo-yo and she spent years losing and gaining the same 30kg over and over.

Her disordered eating continued into her thirties and it became so overwhelming she contemplated suicide. 

‘I drove around the edge of the cliffs of Cape Town wanting to end it all,’ she says. 

Thankfully, she didn’t go through with it, and soon afterwards she met her husband, got married and started her own business.  

But her battle with food continued even after having her two children, a son and a daughter.

Despite thinking ‘I need to stop this’ over and over again, she simply couldn’t. Her binging, purging and laxative abuse were having serious health implications.

‘In my forties I fainted and scraped my face against the wall,’ she says.

‘My body was so dehydrated that I ended up in a hospital ward surrounded by sick people.

‘But I wasn’t sick, I had done it to myself. I looked in the mirror that day, shook my head and thought: “What am I doing to my children?”‘ 

At 52, Alison hit ‘rock bottom’ after her business fell apart after losing US$1.3million (A$2million) to fraud.

‘After having built up this award-winning company, we crashed. We were literally on our knees. My husband and I had to rebuild from the ground up,’ Alison says. 

The financial strain put pressure on her marriage and it was one of the most challenging situations Alison has ever been in both personally and professionally.

While she was aware rebuilding her business could take years, Alison knew there was one thing she could take control of in that moment – her health.

By then, she was going through menopause too – but rather than see it as a reason not to start, she began to view it like her failed business – as another challenge to overcome. 

As she struggled in other areas of her life, it was like something had finally clicked when it came to weight loss and health.  

‘I signed up with a personal trainer who was wonderful but for an entire year I felt like I was in victim mode. Then something started shifting and I joined a run club, then started swimming and doing yoga,’ she says. 

‘I’ve been running for eight years now and the furthest I’ve ever run is 21km, which I only started doing in my fifties.’ 

At 58 she made another promise to herself: she was going to stop stepping on the scales. Instead she was going to focus on how good it felt to fuel and move her body. 

When she turned 60, Alison experienced a spiritual shift after attending a ten-day wellness retreat where she was ‘forced to confront herself’.

Now, six years later, Alison feels like she’s aging backwards and is on a mission to prove it’s never too late to start. 

She maintains mostly a vegetarian based diet full of fibrous vegetables, eggs, salads and smoothies. 

Now in her mid-sixties, Alison feels like she’s aging backwards and is on a mission to prove it’s never too late to start (pictured with her husband of 31 years) 

Alison’s ‘day on a plate’

Alison follows the intermittent fasting eating pattern whereby she doesn’t eat until 11am. She also eats light and maintains a healthy, fresh diet

Morning: Cup of tea and/or warm water with lemon 

11am: Boiled eggs, salad, crackers, fruit

Midday snack: Fruit

Lunch: Smoothie with yoghurt 

Dinner: Alison called herself the ‘salad queen’ as she enjoys filling the salad with up to 15 different ingredients. On occasion for extra protein, she’ll have chicken soup 

Alison’s workout routine

Alison maintains a consistent workout routine. She aims to move her body daily based on how she’s feeling, but doesn’t obsess over it. 

Her favourite exercises are reformer pilates and swimming, but she also runs, walks, meditates and does yoga 

She starts and finishes the day with meditation and prayer 

Alison also puts away her phone at 7pm to clear her mind before bed  

‘When I look back at my life, I think if I hadn’t been so plagued, I would have been a more present mother and a better parent,’ Alison says. 

‘I would have been more loving, more kind, I wouldn’t have been so insecure, I wouldn’t have been so judgmental, I would have had more joy in my life. 

‘My biggest regret is the damage I did to my children by not being good enough and constantly plagued by that.’ 

Last year, before her daughter boarded a plane bound for Australia, Alison handed her a letter. 

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the person I used to be,’ it began.

Mother and daughter embraced and no other words were said. They just held each other and cried. 

Now Alison is a successful global speaker and coach who helps empower others and teach them how to reinvent themselves, and wrote a book titled ‘Belonging: Finding Tribes of Meaning’.

Support services are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week across Australia: 

Lifeline: 13 11 14 

***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk