What do posting bikini pics at age 56 and being a doctor have in common? They can both be “an inspiration,” says Dr. Jen Ashton, a former GMA3 chief medical correspondent, OB-GYN, obesity medicine specialist and nutritionist. When Ashton started posting her progress photos on Instagram, that’s what many women told her she was. “That word is just gold, because that’s why I became a doctor,” she explains.
Her photos don’t hide what it’s like to get older as a woman, but they also show the power of what spending six months focusing on getting stronger and healthier can do. Getting in arguably the best shape of her life didn’t mean Ashton lost weight — she actually gained six pounds. But Ashton now likes what she sees in the mirror and feels she’s stronger than ever. “And that’s just contrary to our mindset generally,” she says.
When Ashton left her job as chief medical correspondent and co-host of GMA3 in June 2024, she set off on what she calls an “experiment” to age better and become healthier and stronger. She then created a roadmap for other women to conduct their own fitness and nutrition anti-challenges. “Challenges can be failed,” she says. “You can’t fail an experiment because the goal is learning; you will always learn something.” She’s educating women about their health, as she’s always done, through her newsletter and wellness brand Ajenda (which you can now read on Yahoo) and offering her Wellness Experiment program to help put her advice into practice.
It might look like a major career pivot for Ashton, but this is a natural next step for her. She’s spent her entire professional life helping people, especially women, live healthier lives. And now she’s doing it live and direct, sharing expertise from her work in medicine and science communication, along with her own experience of getting fitter in her 50s.
How she got here
“My career in television was nothing short of miraculous,” says Ashton. “I never planned or tried to have a career like that — it literally just happened and evolved, but I am very proud to say that I reached the top of what I could achieve in my role.”
Ashton wanted to become a doctor to empower people to improve their health, which she did as an OB-GYN for six years. The opportunity to work in television came unexpectedly, after friends in the industry suggested she’d be great on camera, Ashton told Columbia College Today. What started as a weekend guest appearance on Fox evolved into a three-year post as the network’s first on-air female medical contributor. She then moved to CBS News and eventually landed at ABC, where she was chief medical correspondent and co-hosted Pandemic: What You Need to Know. “In those early days, I really put a stake in the sand and said to our producer and the network, ‘We have to have the honesty to say what we know,’” says Ashton. “Science is not black and white; it’s so much more nuanced than that, and I love providing that nuance for people.”
Ashton used her skill to explain everything from the pandemic to foodborne illness and wildfire smoke to millions of American viewers as a network TV correspondent. She found she had a talent for communication and learned a lot by covering so many disparate health issues. But after 18 years doing the broadest possible coverage, Ashton craved focus. “All I want to talk about is what I’m credentialed in,” she says. “When I stepped down from that role, it was almost entirely because I felt that I had more work to do.”
She decided to devote her full attention to Ajenda, publishing articles that cut through the noise around issues related to women’s health, obesity and nutrition. “And it just so happens that those are literally the biggest topics in the country right now,” Ashton says.
The turning point
While scaling up Ajenda, Ashton was embarking on her own personal wellness journey. “Even though I was going to the gym five days a week, I wasn’t fit,” she explains. “I knew because I would be at a party and be dancing, and I would get out of breath. Or I would look in the mirror and see an image of someone that, as I call it, was ‘skinny fat.’”
Ashton called in an expert to help her figure out a fitness routine to see if, in combination with her own nutrition expertise, her tone and stamina could be restored. With the help of personal trainer Korey Rowe, her experiment has been working in spades. And, in response to her social media posts documenting the process, “tens of thousands of women literally asked me to share what I was doing with them,” says Ashton. So, she did, co-creating with Rowe a wellness “experiment” that includes a fitness regimen, meal plans, Q&As with Ashton herself, video content and a community forum. It’s helped its members get moving, and it’s helped Ashton do something she couldn’t do on network television: interact directly with the women in her audience.
Ashton’s ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ for better aging
Out: One-size-fits-all health advice
One of the reasons Ashton is eager to reach people is that she’s tired of social media — and even mainstream media — painting health with too broad a brush. She’s frustrated by “influencers who are really capitalizing on people’s interest, need or desperation to improve their health and, in my opinion, are being dishonest from a scientific communication standpoint by implying that there’s only one way to do something,” Ashton says. That’s why she frames her approach as an experiment. She’s shared what has worked (really, really well) for her, but emphasizes that each person needs to test it themselves and make changes accordingly. “See how you feel. Make those observations. What have you learned? What do you want to jettison? That, to me, is the sweet spot,” says Ashton.
In: Staying curious
As Ashton notes, it’s common for women to hit a weight and fitness plateau in their 40s or 50s, due in large part to the hormonal changes of menopause. It’s easy to get stuck, especially without guidance about what to do differently — something Ashton experienced herself. “If you don’t have curiosity and an open mind” to try new things, “you’re not going to move the needle for your own health,” she says.
Out: The all-or-nothing theory of wellness
The carnivore diet. Heavy lifting. Plant-based only. Cardio only. If you consume health and wellness content, you’ve probably heard one, if not all, of these single-item practices touted for solving everything from weight gain and menopause to back pain and more, with studies backing the benefits of each one. “It’s literally cherry-picking your data points to serve your message, and I am fundamentally against that” all-or-nothing mentality, she says. She’s particularly annoyed by advice that claims women only need to do heavy lifting and should never do certain kinds of cardio. “First women got the message that all they needed to do was zone two cardio, and now there are other, bigger voices saying, ‘No, you need to do HIIT cardio,’” Ashton explains. “And guess what? You need both of them. But the moderate gray zone doesn’t get clicks and follows, and I just think that that way of living has to go.”
In: Aging with vitality
Ashton doesn’t care for the term “longevity, because it’s not just about how long we’re on the planet,” she says. Instead, she hopes to see and promote a greater focus on vitality and an end to ageism. “I think we’ve already started to see that 60 is the new 40, 70 is the new 50, and I think that’s great,” she says. It’s not just about people looking younger than they are, but living like they are and extending their health span. To accomplish that, she says, there’s more work to be done in preventing diseases that affect women as they age, noting that heart disease doesn’t just affect men. She also suspects that using GLP-1 medications for maintenance and prevention — not just weight loss — might become an important piece of the women’s health equation.
Out: Being glued to a smartphone
“This isn’t anything earth-shattering, but I think the entire planet — and certainly our country — is seeing now that the screen life, the tech life, is not only suboptimal, but damaging in a lot of ways,” says Ashton. Amid teen anxiety, tech neck, and shrunken attention spans, she is over living life on a smartphone. The good news is that Ashton believes change is on the way. “I think we’re already at the beginning of that pendulum swing back to in-real-life experiences and analoging,” she says.