California mom wants women to embrace their bodies

She looked in the mirror one day and didn't like what was staring back at her.

Christy Magnani, 38, was getting old. OK, older. To many, this college professor and mother of two from Folsom, Calif., remains in the bloom of youth. But to her, the mirror did not lie.

"I noticed this wrinkle here," Magnani says, pointing to the vertical line between her eyebrows.

"And these wrinkles here," she says, meaning the beginnings of crow's feet around the eyes.

"And these frown marks, too," she added, meaning the parentheses around her mouth.

Magnani had seriously considered getting a little work done on her face. Many of the other Starbucks-swilling moms waiting for kids outside the local elementary school were doing it, she thought. And there certainly are numerous plastic surgery centers from which to choose on Folsom's East Bidwell Street alone.

"But all of a sudden, I caught my 8-year-old daughter looking at me looking at myself in the mirror," Magnani recalls. "At that moment, I realized I'm making quite an impression on her.

"Girls start developing negative body stereotypes as young as 6 and, as mothers, we're their role models. I thought, I can either choose for her to emulate healthy behavior or unhealthy behavior."

That was the final episode in a confluence of events that spurred Magnani, a business professor at Sierra College and William Jessup University in Rocklin, Calif., to start essentially a one-woman campaign to educate women to forgo aesthetic plastic surgery and learn to embrace their faces — and bodies — through all stages of life.

Her Web site (www.realbodystory.com) and lecture program, Real Body Story, were launched in January, seeking online contributions from women wanting to share their body-image issues. The program's first multimedia presentation will be at Sierra College's Love Your Body Week in late March.

Body-image awareness, it seemed, saturated Magnani's life to such a point that she had to act. It had been more than 15 years since she had overcome an eating disorder during her college days as a tennis star at Sacramento State. But she found the same old obsession still prevalent in the culture.

Around the same time as the mirror incident, Magnani was dealing with the emotional fallout from her younger sister's decadelong struggle with anorexia and bulimia, which resulted in hospitalization several times.