Perth mum's shock over her four-year-old daughter who 'thinks she's fat'

There's not much that shocks, radio host Heidi Anderson these days.

But when she heard a fellow mum at the gym say that her four-year-old daughter "thinks she's fat the 39-year-old says she was stopped in her tracks.

"As a mum of a four-year-old myself, my heart just broke," she tells 9honey Parenting.

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The mum went on to reveal that her daughter had also been "looking at herself in the mirror and grabbing her tummy".?

An action Anderson can relate to after decades of suffering from her own body image issues.

So she gently asked 'who speaks like that in your house?'

And she says the mum stopped what she was doing and looked her straight in the eyes and said "me".?

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Anderson is no stranger to negative self-talk - she's created a career and a community around body positivity and says she knows exactly what was going on with this mum.

Anderson says she gently warned her that kids "hear everything, they see everything and the change starts with you".

Because Anderson noticed her son mimicking her own negative body image behaviour from just three-years-old.

"I remember I was getting ready for an event and I was looking in the mirror and pulling down my top and really focusing on the tummy or your arms or whatever, all the problem areas that I had and I noticed he started doing the same thing in the mirror without me saying anything."

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She said that moment was a massive wake up call, that she needed to watch what she was doing as well as what she was saying in front of her son.

"My personal journey has really helped with this so I don't comment on anything to do with my appearance in the house."

"I've spent most of my life judging myself, not wearing the bikini, not walking outside with my arms uncovered."

Anderson reveals she's been negative about her body since she was just a child herself.

She says growing up, she always felt like "the funny, fat one" of the group, a label that stuck after she experienced her first kiss.

"I remember I had my first kiss and I was walking away feeling really happy with myself and I heard the boy say to the guy that I kissed, 'oh you kissed the fat one' and so that was when I got that validation of 'oh that's what they do think'."

She said that one sentence led to her unravelling.

"That's when I started the emotional eating because I didn't know how to express my feelings or share this with people because we weren't encouraged to do that back then."

Anderson says instead of being able to talk about it, her mum signed her up to lose weight.

"My mum took me to weight watchers and that is the worst thing you could possibly do but she just thought she was helping."

As a result, as she details in her memoir, "Drunk On Confidence", Anderson spent years feeling lost, anxious and hating her body.

It wasn't until she fell pregnant, that she had "an awakening" she says.

Once Anderson could see how her body could grow and hold a baby, she didn't see the need to be so mean to it anymore.?

A sentiment she consciously tries to model for her four-year-old son.

Rather than focussing on appearance, Anderson tries to draw her son's attention to feelings.

"One of the really simple things that I do with my little boy when he's getting dressed in the morning is, I say 'how does that make you feel' and he's like 'happy' and I'm like great."

Anderson says it's the simple phrases like this that we need to reprogram in our brains, so that our kids don't develop the same insecurities we focussed on growing up.