Former Victoria’s Secret model Gisele Bündchen on regretting her secret breast augmentation

IT CAN be difficult to sympathise with supermodels like Gisele who seem to have it all together, but she’s opened up about some of her biggest challenges and regrets.

Model Gisele Bündchen has opened about some of her challenges in a new memoir. Picture: Evan Agostini/Getty Images

SHE’S one of the world’s most successful models, but even former Victoria’s Secret angel Gisele Bündchen says she suffers from body insecurities.

The 38-year-old has opened about going under the knife for a secret breast augmentation in 2015, a decision she says she immediately regretted.

After breastfeeding both her son Benjamin and daughter Vivian for more than 18 months each, she felt her breasts were smaller and slightly uneven.

“I was always praised for my body, and I felt like people had expectations from me that I couldn’t deliver,” Bündchen wrote in her new 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,” she wrote.

Gisele Bündchen during the 2005 Victoria's Secret Fashion show. Picture: AP Photo/Jeff Christensen

She decided to undergo a breast enlargement procedure. But she wishes she had never had the surgery.

“When I woke up, I was like, ‘What have I done?’ I felt like I was living in a body I didn’t recognise,” she wrote. “For the first year I wore (baggy) clothes because I felt uncomfortable.”

Her husband, American football star Tom Brady, encouraged her to love her new body.

“He just said, ‘I love you no matter what’ and that I looked beautiful,” she said.

Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen at the 2018 Met Gala. Picture: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images/AFP

In her new book, the supermodel has also written about her battles with mental illness, explaining how she used to suffer from dehabilitating panic attacks.

“I had a wonderful position in my career, and I was very close to my family, and I always considered myself a positive person, so I was really beating myself up. Like, ‘Why should I be feeling this?’ I felt like I wasn’t allowed to feel bad,” Bundchen said.

“But I felt powerless. Your world becomes smaller and smaller, and you can’t breathe, which is the worst feeling I’ve ever had.”

The 2005 Victoria’s Secret show.

The panic attacks continued, which led her to a dark place.

“I actually had the feeling of, ‘If I just jump off my roof, this is going to end, and I never have to worry about this feeling of my world closing in’,” she explained.

The mother-of-two detailed the night she considered ending her own life, as described in her forthcoming memoir, Lessons, which is published on October 2.

“It felt like everything in my life was going to kill me. First it was the aeroplanes, then elevators. Then it was tunnels and hotels and modelling studios and cars. Now it was my own apartment,” Bündchen wrote.

“Everything had become a cage, and I was the animal trapped inside, panting for air. I couldn’t see a way out, and I couldn’t stand another day of feeling this way.”

She continued: “The idea swept over me then: Maybe it will be easier if I just jump. It will be all over. I can get out of this.

“When I think back on that moment, and that 23-year-old girl, I want to cry. I want to tell her that everything will be all right, that she hasn’t even begun to live her life. But in that moment, the only answer seemed to be to jump.”

Model Gisele Bündchen at the 2009 Rainforest Alliance gala in New York City. Picture: Scott Wintrow/Getty Images

After consulting with doctors, Bündchen sought to change several aspects of her life.

“I had been smoking cigarettes, drinking a bottle of wine and three mocha frappuccinos every day, and I gave up everything in one day,” she revealed.

“I thought, ‘If this stuff is in any way the cause of this pain in my life, it’s gotta go’.”

But Bündchen says all the challenges have helped her grow as a person.

“This was definitely another lesson: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But I wish I would have learned that a different way,” she said.

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