Jenna Bush Experienced Body Image Issues as a Young Girl

Jenna Bush Experienced Body Image Issues as a Young Girl

Jenna Bush, daughter of former president George W. Bush and a host on the show TODAY with Hoda & Jenna, made some revelations in April 2019. She announced her third pregnancy, and that she knows it a boy, plus the shocking news that she experienced body image issues as early as in the first grade.

Bush shared these details as she was speaking with Meredith Viera, who filled in for Hoda Kotb. The discussion was spurred by the topic about how Jennifer Garner looked on the cover of People’s Most Beautiful issue. Talking about beauty and body image surely hit a nerve with the former first-daughter.

Jenna may have forgotten about her body image issues, but she was reminded of it when she discovered a childhood notebook she had kept. She recalled that she may have been just 7 or 8 years old at that time when she made her first-grade journal. Her young self wrote in there that her New Year’s Resolution was to ‘lose 4 pounds.’ She even originally wrote 7 but scratched it out and changed it to 4.

The host further tells that it was her sister Barbara who first found her first-grade journal and it made her cry. Barbara probably revealed this after Jenna informed her of the discovery, since she wanted to keep it from her sister for the fear that it would upset her, especially when she was pregnant.

Along with the revelation of her body image issue at an early age, Jenna also expressed her fear of passing down the same thing to her young children, who are both girls. Her eldest, Mila, is 6 years old, while her youngest daughter, Poppy, is 3. She says that right now the young girls seem so proud whenever they look at themselves in the mirror, and Jenna wants to discover how she can keep her girls feeling that way even when they grow up.

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