Ignore the emaciation culture - Anna Blundy wants her children plump and confident

My daughter is fat. She has folds of fat around her stomach and huge creases in her thighs. My son is fat too. They’re both lovely squishy, soft, biscuit-smelling puddings of things with dimples in their cheeks and knees and even in the small of their backs. They’re one and three respectively.

Sometimes, when I call one of them fatty on the street an emaciated woman in high heels will stare at me in horror. The worst imaginable insult, meant in this case, as the highest form of compliment. I hate those skinny, stringy babies that some people have, nothing to sink into.

I think it was just breast milk that did it. Or genetics. Or something. Neither of them ever eats sweets or chocolate or chips. They aren’t even allowed fruit juice at home. Why give them a glass of sugar when they could have water? They both like broccoli and fish. But they are great, big, soft, marshmallowy beasts of things and I’m so glad. Happy and healthy they look.

Of course, if they’re clinically obese as six year olds, stuffing four Big Macs a day and stealing money to buy crisps and Mars bars I’ll lock them inside with a lettuce leaf for comfort. But then I think that kind of behaviour is learnt from parents. I haven’t been in a McDonalds for at least a decade and I don’t buy chocolate or sweets ever. In fact, I don’t even buy biscuits. This isn’t a matter of principle - I just don’t much like them and the children are happy with a handful of raisins.

That is not to say that we have some hippyish aversion to anything bad for you. I often make puddings and cakes and, of course, Lev and Hope cram them down. I dyed some vanilla sauce pink with cochineal the other day and passed it off as Tubby Custard.

But I hope, to sound pious about it, that these are children who will eat quite normally as teenagers and adults. They certainly eat a lot, but they don’t eat crap. I’m not skinny (especially since they were born...) and I have never been on a diet. Ten stone and five foot six. My husband isn’t thin either and we both love food. Basically, food and eating aren’t big topics for discussion in our house. We cook it. Well, let’s face it, I cook it. And we eat it. No chance of them being anorexic because of my obsession with being thin.

Or is there? You see so many parents on Trisha and Kilroy saying they have no idea why their child suddenly became fixated on food - eating it, not eating it, throwing it up. One gets the impression that it’s all to do with insecurity and self-image, but the parents are quite convincing on the subject of their children’s former stability and general joy.

It’s hard in a media culture of emaciation - doesn’t Jennifer Anniston look better now she is painfully thin? Well, no. She looks sort of glossier and less real and a lot less sexy and happy. But it must be possible to make children, especially girls, aware of the truth. And the truth is that people look better when they’re not thin. Also, and this we already know, when they’re not fat.

I would be devastated to think that my children might not like the way they look. They are so perfect and beautiful. She isn’t quite one yet but I worry about my daughter becoming a teenager and wanting to straighten her amazing wild curly hair. Or dye it or God knows what. How will I make her aware of how lovely she is? On the other hand, maybe she will have a short back and sides and be far too busy taking her motorbike apart to worry about her hair.

And that, I suppose, is what I hope. I hope they both have so much interest in other things that they never sit around thinking about what they look like. I hope people will fall madly in love with them because they are funny and clever and fantastic and will find them gorgeous in the same way that I do - because they are, not because Hope has a short skirt on or Lev is wearing Armani aftershave.