How mothers can shape the body images of their children

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/08/mothers-shaping-body-image-children

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It's only this year, as a baby has grown inside me, that I've properly understood the dark pressures that come with living in a body that does not feel entirely your own. I've never dieted. I have never tried to change the shape of me. And yet now, as I swell and tighten, and things happen to my ankles, people in supermarkets will offer sudden opinions about my body, and I will quickly be transported out of it, looking over at my convex self as if into a stranger's home from the top of a bus.

I had been warned about people touching my tummy, but it turns out I don't mind that. It's funny. Camp. The difficult things for me (having had months of concerned consultants discussing the baby's growth, and my own muted expansion) have been the congratulations (occasionally from a health worker) on having put on so little weight. Sometimes I tell the congratulators that this is not, actually, a good sign, and sometimes I just smile a bit.

But either way I am aware of the hollowness of such a compliment. And even though I know they're pointing out something that is evidence of, if not bad health then less than ideal circumstances, something I feel guilty about at night, I feel a fleeting pride in this loose achievement. There is still value here in being thin, even when the thinness suggests all's not well. It's complicated, the hurdles set up between mind and body, especially when your body feels like it's running away from you.

Which is why I'm so interested in this week's report by Susie Orbach and Holli Rubin on the impact of body image in pregnancy and after birth. It looks at the health and psychological effects that body image can have on pregnant women, and explains how problems can be unconsciously transmitted to our children.

It talks about the things we know and the things we didn't know we knew – we know about rising levels of obesity, but we know less about the impact of chaotic eating, the thousands of people who are obsessive about their bodies and feel unsafe around food. And as body image and eating problems continue to rise, the report suggests intervention during pregnancy could be the perfect way to help two populations at once – the child, whose behaviours are just being established, and the mother, at a time when she is uniquely receptive to getting things right.

It's so strange, all this. Your body becomes an egg, to be carried fast on a spoon. For women who have always followed diets (the average woman goes on 16 diets in her life) it can be alarming to relinquish them and the control they stand for. The way they make them feel. Similarly, women who have always overeaten can further distance themselves from their bodies during pregnancy, overfuelling without recognising hunger, "eating for two".

And then, then there's the drip drip of pressure to "snap back" to your old silhouette after childbirth. Your jeans are still there, folded. Your favourite dress, and a Davina DVD, and a celebrity on a beach. The report talks about how babies respond to the mother's food insecurities – her chaotic eating becomes theirs. Her attitudes towards bodies, other people's and her own, become theirs. Body image evolves from right then.

In the same way that interventions to promote breastfeeding and to reduce smoking during pregnancy have been successful, could the report's recommendations – that midwives discuss nutrition and body image with the women they treat – actually have a serious impact on the next generation of eaters? I do love this idea, if only for its efficiency. Not only will the women be encouraged to think about body image in a way that is neither intimidatingly medical nor trivial, but they could immunise their child against a life of hating themselves, where food is a trial, and hunger is misunderstood, and dieting is normal, and bodies are battlefields.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman