Kaitlyn Bristowe Is Ready for 40 and Has Never Felt Stronger or Sexier

The ‘Bachelorette’ alumn says goodbye to her 30s and hello to a new decade with a positive attitude and new ‘twins!’

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Kaitlyn Bristowe has always been an open book. We saw it during her season of The Bachelorette, and continue to on Instagram to her 1.8 million followers, on her podcast Off the Vine and during the SI Swimsuit Social Club weekend where she was the moderator for the Sink or Swim panels. As she prepares to turn the page and start a new decade on June 19, 40 is not an age that intimidates her. In fact, she is “hyped” for this birthday. 

“It’s the most confidence I’ve ever felt,” she tells SI Swimsuit. “It's the strongest I've ever felt. I've never felt sexier. I feel like at this point in life, 40 is about proving not to anyone else, but to myself that age is just a number. It's not about chasing youth anymore. It's about celebrating this next chapter and feeling the best version of myself.”

Bristowe didn’t always feel this way. With a mom who was a professional ballerina and dancing ballet herself since she was 6, the scrutiny over her own body started young. “We were constantly in the mirror of the studio picking ourselves apart, so it was like one generation of body dysmorphia passed down to the next,” she explains. “I would just look at myself and try to find things that were wrong. I'd focus on it like one eye being smaller than the other. I had scoliosis, so the fact that my hip stuck out on one side more than the other, I would think I was disgusting.”

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Social media may not have been around, but that didn’t mean there weren’t outside influences. “We had magazines telling you how to lose 10 pounds or telling you to eat three orange slices and five almonds,” she says. “And you believe what you're told. It just creates some really disordered eating.”

After 13 years of therapy, visits to Onsite and Hoffman and lots of mirror selfie high fives, her confidence was built up. “I've done every form of therapy that you could imagine, and I think that's where a lot of my self-worth comes from,” Bristowe notes. “I've done some serious work on myself when it comes to how I talk to myself. I'll tell you, in the last maybe five to seven years, I've noticed such a difference. I used to look in the mirror and say awful things to myself. I used to think that aging was so scary, instead of thinking of it as a privilege.”

Bristowe’s mindset has shifted. “Instead of starting to see my cellulite, I'm very quick to turn it around, and I'll start talking about how lucky I am to be where I'm at in life,” she adds. “I'll just start talking positively instead of negatively. That has taken years of training to do with my brain, but I feel like I could do it now.”

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The Nashville resident continues to be open about all aspects of her life. “Part of living a bold, fearless, authentic life to me is being vulnerable,” she reveals. “And I pride myself on being vulnerable on social media, whether it's showing my ups or downs or things I've had done or things I want to talk about just because that's just who I am, and that's always who I have been.” 

She has shared all about her upper bleph eyelid surgery, and most recently, posted about her new breast implants, which were an early 40th birthday present to herself. Her eagle-eyed fans were quick to notice the enhancement even if it is only one cup size, so she took control of the narrative in a very “Kaitlyn way” and changed her bio from "Big heart, small boobs” to “Big heart, small implants” and joked that she “got twins!”

Originally planning to have the surgery after she had kids, Bristowe decided not to wait. “I'm so happy about it,” she shares. “Because I went so small, the recovery wasn't terrible. The worst part for me was coming off Percocet because I didn't know you couldn't just do that cold turkey. I actually didn't know how to wean myself off of it.”

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To ensure she didn’t go down a path like she did at 27 when she became addicted to Valium, Bristowe responsibly hired a night nurse to help administer her medicine. “I never wanted to go down that road again,” she reveals. 

She may be wiser in her age, but growing older has also made her take more control of her health. “The most 40-year-old thing ever,” she will have fibroids removed in July. Inspired by her dear friend and fellow Bachelorette alumn, Katie Thurston, who was diagnosed with breast cancer at 34, Bristowe had a Prenuvo scan. “I just feel like educating yourself, taking care of your body and doing all the research on all of the right things is just so powerful because you just never know,” she says. “I just loved having that knowledge because I get so anxious about things being wrong or going wrong.”

Up to this point, her life has been a rollercoaster.  “In my twenties, I was working three different jobs and had to quit dancing because I wasn't good enough,” she shares. “I tried to chase a boy instead, and thought I could rely on him for the rest of my life and lost myself completely.” 

Kaitlyn Bristowe

Her 30s were a decade of highs and lows. She celebrated that milestone birthday during her season of The Bachelorette where she got engaged to Shawn Booth, though they later split in 2018. She appeared on Broadway, and in 2020, she was the Dancing With the Stars Season 29 winner with partner Artem Chigvintsev. More recently, she ended her second engagement—this time in 2023 to Bachelor alumn Jason Tartick.

Despite the two very public breakups, she is not ruling out love though she may not be so quick to share this aspect of her life on social media. “Of course, I believe in marriage and finding a partner,” she says. “I still definitely want it. It's just, to be honest, even being engaged twice, it was never something that I felt I needed or dreamt of. It was more like, O.K., I got engaged from television; that was part of the format. I was really in love. I really did think it could work. It didn't. Then the next one was kind of like, O.K., well, this is what we do now. We're at this age. We've been together this long. This feels like the next step, when I wasn't listening to my gut, and I was doing what I thought was right.”

Kaitlyn Bristowe

Bristowe now has a different approach. “I'm going to take my time. My bulls--- radar is dialed in, and I feel like I have never trusted my gut more in my life than I do every year that I age,” she adds. “I do things more for myself than what I'm supposed to do, what other people think I should do. That definitely goes into finding a partner. I'm such a believer in timing. And I know it will happen when the time is right.”

And for the next 10 years, she has big plans for her career and life with a lot of time spent with her dogs in between. Manifestation has been an integral part in arriving to this point, but what she is aspiring for now varies from her thirties. “I want to feel at peace, and I want to spend more quality time with the people that mean the most to me,” she says. “I still want to do that while working hard and having ambition.” 

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That perseverance and her candor is how she found herself on stage at the SI Swimsuit Social Club as panel host. “I was not expecting to fall so hard in love with the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit family because that's exactly what it feels like,” she comments. “I felt like I had just met a whole group of new women that inspired me. Getting to interview them, they are beautiful on the inside and out. They all have their own insecurities, and they're so vulnerable to talk about them. It healed something in me that I needed healed. I always thought, I'll only be successful if I look this certain way, and if I'm this certain age. Being part of that weekend and now being part of the family, I just feel like it healed something in my inner child. I’ve never felt more aligned.”

It was the best way to culminate her last month in her 30s. “I really do feel like I am exactly in the place I'm supposed to be,” Bristowe says. “I feel on top of the world right now.”