“When I look at myself in the mirror naked, I feel like I’m something straight out of National Geographic,” one of my closest friends said at 8:30 a.m. last Monday.

She had just stopped nursing her second child, and I knew exactly to which part of her body she was referring.

I cackled and told her that I’d be happy to escort her personally to the latest and greatest plastic surgeon and that in no time, she’d look like she was straight out of Playboy.

“I guess people really do that, right?” she asked me, semi-seriously. I’m sure they do, I told her.

After I hung up the phone, I realized very quickly I could think of several people I knew who had taken the plastic surgery plunge.

The line used to go that New York nourishes your soul, while Los Angeles nourishes your body. But these days, I’m not so sure New Yorkers are focusing quite as much on attaining spiritual enlightenment as they are on acquiring a six-pack. And all the more of a challenge if you’ve had a baby – or two, or three.

Since when did stick-thin, wrinkle-free, flab-free, and fabulous become the standard to which some New York women, particularly those with young children, hold themselves?

In Cape Town, where my family spends some time each year, these moms are called “yummy mummies.” (In New York, though, where proper etiquette often takes a back seat to candor, the “hot moms” have a different, unprintable epithet.)

One friend told me about an old roommate of hers who started losing weight as soon as her last child was born. “She’s done having her kids, so she had a tummy tuck and a boob job. And I’ve never seen her so thin.”

While the average American woman is getting larger each year, it seems to me that New York women are getting thinner and thinner. When buying holiday gifts this week, I noticed that the largest size some trendy boutiques carry is a 10.

“The women that come in here are tiny,” a manager of a well-known, stylish local chain store said. “They come in, often pushing a stroller, to pick up a new pair of jeans, or a little top. We definitely see more size 0s than we do size 10s. I don’t know how they get that way, but that’s what we’re seeing.”

“I know they say that women can never be too rich or too thin, but these days in New York, the women are taking it to new levels,” a mother of three said. “They are so buff and so thin, and of course it’s all to impress each other. Some of the men might care a little bit, but the women are really doing it for themselves and each other.”

A woman I know recently decided to forgo baby gifts, choosing instead to have her friends pitch in to buy her private sessions with a trainer who is known to perform miracles.

“It was my third kid. My friends knew I didn’t need baby clothes, but that I wanted to get back into my own clothes quickly. This guy is amazing. I only go twice a week and a few months after the baby was born, I was back to a size 4,” she said.

A dermatologist in practice on the Upper East Side says that she tells her patients not to get too thin. “It’s either your face or your a–,” she told me. “Some of these women look like they have 8% body fat. And then they want you to plump up their faces, their necks, their breasts. It looks ridiculous. But this thinness, this working out two hours a day, is like an illness. They’re addicted.”

Not everyone is reed thin. I asked a mother of two, who wears a size 14, what she thought of our city’s emphasis on looking young and thin. “Look, I wish I weighed 110 pounds. But I don’t. And I’m not going to. I used to have moments where I envied some of those girls, but far more often, I actually feel lucky not to judge my day by whether or not I made it to the gym or if I ate carbs. No matter how much Botox some of those women inject, you still can’t help but see just how much effort it takes for them to look a certain way, and just how much pressure they are putting on each other, and on themselves. I really have better things to devote my energy to and am happy not to feel conflicted about it.”

The other day I was forwarded an e-mail from one 60-plus woman to another, complaining about a friend of theirs.

“There is not a drop of cellulite to be found on her body. It’s just so unfair,” she wrote.

At first I couldn’t believe that in her 60s, this woman was still hung up on cellulite. Do we women ever stop worrying about what we look like in a bathing suit? Or do these fears just mean we want to remain confident and attractive throughout our lives? If it isn’t taken to an extreme, maybe there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a “hot mom” – or in this case, a hot grandmom.

sarasberman@aol.com