Valerie Bertinelli is sharing a message of self-love – in her swimsuit. In a new social media post, the actress shows off her amazing body in a bathing suit while lounging in a pool. “2014 #tbt This is a 150lb body on a 5’4 frame. I don’t weigh myself anymore because this is considered overweight by who’s standards I don’t know. It’s stupid and I believed them for far too long,” she writes. “I now, finally, know that I am a kind, considerate, funny, thoughtful woman. So please remember, who you are and what your character is, should never be overshadowed by what size you are or how much you weigh. You are enough. Just the way you are.” How does the actress, 63, approach health and fitness? Celebwell has the details on her weight loss struggles.
Bertinelli has struggled with weight loss most of her life. She told People that she started 2020 off on a mission: To lose 10 lbs., “the same 10 lbs. I had been trying to lose for the past forty years,” she said. However, she decided not to weigh herself. “No. I can’t be doing this again,” she thought to herself. It was then she realized tying her self-worth to numbers on the scale was making her fail.
“The goal is to live in the moment, and not according to the scale,” she continued. She lost her ex-husband Eddie Van Halen later in 2020, and realized losing weight wouldn’t help with grief either. “There is no magic number that will make me feel good about myself,” she said.
Bertinelli tries to prioritize self-love, which can be evidenced in her recent post. “I’m done judging myself,” she writes in her book, Enough Already. “I want to be kinder and more accepting of myself.”
Valerie became a spokesperson for Jenny Craig at the age of 47, and it wasn’t for the right reasons. “I wasn’t trying to get healthy or deal with the reasons I had gained weight over the years. I had split from Ed and I refused to take money from him. As a single working mom I needed to make money. Jenny Craig was a good job,” she writes in her book. While she lost a whopping 50 pounds in two years and posed in a bikini for the cover of People in 2009, it was short-lived. “I started to gain weight as soon as the photo shoot ended,” she continues. “I was starving myself and doing twice a day workouts. Some people can look like that without doing that but not me. And there is shame for being part of the problem to make other people think they could do it. I bought into it hook, line and sinker, but I didn’t take care of my head and my heart and I think it really starts with that.”
“I have a lot of decades of thinking I have to look a certain way for people to accept me and to like me,” she writes. “We’re all part of this diet culture that isn’t actually helping us, our mental or emotional health. I’m trying to dismantle all of the things I learned that are ingrained in me. And I’ve learned there are many people that feel the same exact way that I do. Some of us were taught the wrong things.”
How did she win the weight struggle wars? “I gave up the damn scale,” she says. “I haven’t weighed myself since I finished writing the book and all I know is every time I put on my jeans, they fit. I don’t have to lay back and put them on! Every time I want to get on the scale, I think, ‘Why would you do that Valerie?’ Because it’s not about the number. There’s not going to be before and after photos. Whatever happens happens,” she continued. “This is what I am. Right now. Today.”