Even the most successful supermodels aren’t immune to feeling insecure about their bodies. After breastfeeding both of her children for more than a year and a half each, Gisele Bündchen was left with smaller and slightly different sized breasts. This change in her body’s appearance negatively affected her self-esteem.
“I was always praised for my body, and I felt like people had expectations from me that I couldn’t deliver,” she told People in an interview ahead of the release of her memoir, Lessons: My Path To A Meaningful Life. “I felt very vulnerable, because I can work out, I can eat healthy, but I can’t change the fact that both of my kids enjoyed the left boob more than the right. All I wanted was for them to be even and for people to stop commenting on it.”
In 2015, Gisele, 38, decided to discreetly undergo a breast augmentation, but realized immediately that she made a mistake. “When I woke up, I was like, ‘What have I done?’ I felt like I was living in a body I didn’t recognize. For the first year I wore [baggy] clothes because I felt uncomfortable,” she confessed.
The model’s husband, Tom Brady, was a huge support system for her. “He just said, ‘I love you no matter what,’ and that I looked beautiful,” she said. “This was definitely another lesson: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But I wish I would have learned that a different way.”
But the hit to her self-esteem wasn’t the only struggle with parenthood Gisele faced. She and the New England Patriots player welcomed their son Benjamin in 2009, and their daughter Vivian in 2012. After having her two kids, Gisele “kind of lost” herself. “It was like a part of me died,” she told the magazine. “I’d been this very independent person. It was all about me. But now I had this little being, and I suddenly felt I couldn’t do other things, and that was very hard for me. All I ever wanted was to be a mom, but when you’re actually experiencing that, it’s a shock.”
Gisele is in a much better place now in terms of motherhood. “[Benjamin and Vivian] are really flourishing to be the beautiful little angels that they are, and I really see myself more as their guardian,” she gushed.
