Why 'Today' Host Jenna Bush Hager Won't Take Weight Loss Medication: 'I Want to Eat'

Jenna Bush Hager got real on live television about why she chooses not to take weight loss medication.

The subject came up during a conversation with Rosie Perez on the Wednesday, September 17, episode of her show, Today with Jenna & Friends, where the actress, 61, complained about an unflattering photo of her that appeared onscreen.

“Oh my God, look at me! No, I look so plump,” Perez commented on the image, which Bush Hager, 43, insisted that she didn’t, only that it was taken at a “bad angle.”

“No, Jenna, Jenna I ate like a pig the whole summer. I ate like a pig the whole summer,” Perez recounted. “We rent a house every summer… my girlfriends come up, and I went, ‘Is everybody on the needle?’ Everybody was skinny, except me! I looked like a beached whale.”

Although the GLP-1 drug — whose use has recently become popular for weight loss — wasn’t named, Bush Hager asked her co-host, “Is everyone on the needle?”

“Everyone’s on the needle! And no judgement, no judgement. I’m just scared,” Perez replied, referencing her fear of needles. “If I wasn’t scared.”

Bush Hager emphasized her motivations behind not using the weight loss drug, which is known to decrease appetite, is because “food is so good.”

“I mean I haven’t done it because I want to eat, you know? Among other reasons,” she continued.

Bush Hager didn’t expand on the reasoning behind not using medication. However, she’s been candid in the past with viewers about her journey with body image.

“I had a boyfriend in seventh grade who broke up with me after we went swimming together after he saw me in a bathing suit,” Bush Hager explained during an April 2023 appearance on Today. “I feel like, even sometimes now, when I feel great — I have three kids [who were born via] three C-sections, I feel really in my body and I think of it as a beautiful thing — I’ll walk in a pool and have a moment [of panic]. There’s been times when [I’ve] done this show when people have written about our body and it takes you back to that moment.”

The mother-of-three, who shares children Mila, Poppy and Hal with husband Henry Hager, explained that she makes it a point to promote a healthy body image to her little ones.

“All we want is loving children. We don’t need the star kid, the this, the that. We want kids that are kind,” she said at the time. “I sometimes think of people as parents, like, ‘You know what, maybe he had news today about his child?’ Even if he’s not one, but like that kind of stress [or] imagine him holding a baby and then it helps you have empathy for whoever it is.”