It has been an emotional couple of years for Valerie Bertinelli. In October 2020, Valerie lost her ex husband, Eddie Van Halen, to throat cancer. In July of last year, Valerie tearfully took to Instagram to call out a troll for making derogatory comments about her weight. Valerie has always been honest about her struggles with her weight. Valerie said that her shame about her body came from her watching her father treat her mother horribly when her mother would gain weight. Valerie also said that being fat shamed by her fifth grade teacher hurt her self-esteem. In a recent cover with People, Valerie opened up about losing Eddie. Valerie also said that she is staying away from the scale and is no longer obsessing over those pesky ten pounds she’s been determined to lose for 40y ears. Below are a few highlights:
In the two years that followed, the 61-year-old star and Food Network host, who says she often felt “like the most famous dieter in America,” came to realize that tying her self-worth to the scale wasn’t working and never had.
It took losing her first husband, guitar virtuoso Eddie Van Halen, who died on Oct. 6, 2020 of cancer at age 65, to see what truly matters. It’s a story she tells in her new memoir, Enough Already, excerpted exclusively in this week’s PEOPLE.
“The goal is to live in the moment,” she says, “and not according to the scale.”
Over time, her grief led to a deeper wisdom about life’s brevity and the road to happiness.
“There is no magic number that will make me feel good about myself,” says Bertinelli, who learned to find the magic in every day — from a mouth-watering recipe, to listening to her son Wolfgang’s new music, to even just watching cat videos. And always finding gratitude like her role model and one-time Hot in Cleveland costar, Betty White.
“I’m done judging myself,” writes Bertinelli. “I want to be kinder and more accepting of myself.”
Still, it’s an ongoing process, she says: “I have a lot of decades of thinking I have to look a certain way for people to accept me and to like me.”
That thinking began early on. “I watched my father treat my mother badly when she would gain weight,” she recalls. “I had a 5th grade teacher poke my belly and say, ‘You want to keep an eye on that.’ So I learned at a very young age that when you gain weight, you’re not lovable. And what I’m learning is that your body is not what makes you lovable.”
I have been a fan of Valerie since her One Day at a Time days. Valerie has always seemed like such a light. I know that Valerie has struggled over the years with her body image and like Ricki Lake I have had a front row seat to her battle. I was really sad when Eddie died in 2020 and Valerie’s tribute to him was beautiful. Despite the sadness of the loss, I am glad that Valerie has been able to use the experience as a catalyst to heal.
I love how Valerie said that she won’t be able to find happiness on the scale. As someone who has been battling with weight the last two decades, those words really hit home with me. Valerie is right, life is short and dwelling on something so insignificant as weight can steal the years away. I hope that Valerie continues to heal and to say no to messaging she received as a child. Living in the moment is a gift and something that I am actively practicing. It takes the anxiety of the future and the pain of the past away. I also hope that Valerie knows no matter what her body looks like, she is and will always be lovable. Anyways, I am hoping that the next few years for Valerie will give her an opportunity to celebrate what she has accomplished and just enjoy her life. Valerie choosing not to hold her happiness hostage by whatever the scale says is a start.
Valerie Bertinelli Says She's Given Up 'the Damn Scale': 'I'm Done Judging Myself' https://t.co/hS0yLaqC5e
— People (@people) January 5, 2022
Photos via Instagram and Twitter and credit: InStar
I would *so* have her over for dinner. She seems decent and fun.
Definitely! She’s one of my favorite follows on Twitter. Always kind, always funny.
I love her, she’s one of my favorites on the Food Network….ironically enough, I just made her chicken cacciatore last night. I’ve made many of her recipes, they aren’t complicated and don’t take a lot of ingredients that I can’t find here in the midwest.
I’m built just about like her (probably shorter though), so I feel her pain, short, curvy and I just can’t ever get rid of those 10 pounds, but I don’t care either. I love to cook and I love to eat and that’s not gonna change anytime soon since I’m 50 years old.
I have always liked her, she seems like a genuinely kind person.
I love how, of all the things she could have chosen as a famous and beloved actress, she chose “wolfiesmom” as her IG handle.
I’ve loved her since One Day at a Time. She is still beautiful and I think the weight looks good on her.
Valerie. Bertinelli. Is. Not. Fat. She never has been. She has been beautiful with soft round features since we loved her as a teen on One Day at a time. My whole life I’ve read about her “struggling with weight” and it’s ridiculous.
Is she tall, angular and bony? No. But that does NOT mean she is fat. Or am I missing some random period where she put on massive amounts of weight and then lost it again?? I think this is purely in her head; and I wish she saw how lovely and angelic she is to me!
She’s totally not fat, looks fantastic, but unfortunately she has long lived in a world of Hollywood standards. And I get her struggling….she seems to end up with super thin co stars, think Mackenzie Phillips (albeit she was also on major drugs) and more recently on Hot in Cleveland, next to Jane Leeves and Wendy Malick who are both tall and super thin.
this!! She is so gorgeous and I also remember looking up to her on One Day At A Time.
I actually broke down in tears reading her excerpt from her book. I also have struggled with weight and self confidence my whole life. I remember my Dad picking at my Mom when she gained weight, he was actually embarrassed of her and she was maybe a size 14… She was always on Weight Watchers and I remember her eating only cauliflower for a week and walking for an hour a night to lose the weight. My mother is gorgeous and looks a lot like Valerie actually. A cute little brunette with big eyes and a curvy body. My Dad was (is) an idiot. (they are still together and he loves her but he can be very hard on us about his version of what is perfection)
That all transferred to me though at a young age and I struggle with a sort of body dysmorphia. Her story about her teacher was what really got me… I also had an experience when I was about 10 years old while swimming with my cousin (who was 16 and the coolest guy ever to me) where he said all of a sudden “damn your thighs are getting HUGE”. I never wore a bathing suit again and rarely went swimming, which is a shame because I was the fish of the family. I’m 47 and still won’t go swimming.
It’s ridiculous and I can see what I’m doing / thinking is absurd, and I can even understand it but I can’t stop the self criticism . I can’t wait to read this book although I can see it being somewhat painful.
Thank-you Oya, you always write with such gentleness about people’s struggles.
I actually saw her and Eddie in an Atlanta airport gift shop in 1982. I recognized them immediately and they saw it and smiled at me, but I just smiled back and didn’t approach. I’m around her age, and I’ve been short and thin. She was the thinnest chick; her legs were like toothpicks. I will never forget that, and have said to friends I told of my celebrity “encounter”, she looks so normal on One Day at a Time, and she’s a total stick in real life. Granted, time changes bodies, but she has such a mindset from being told she was overweight, it’s sad. I would too.
I love this post. This is so well written Oya.
I love Valerie and watch her Food Network show. She seems so genuine and down to earth. I like her a lot and wish her the best on her “self love” journey.
She’s a sweetheart. She’s also correct that the numbers on a scale never ring true happiness.
I cannot stress how important this is. I come from a line of women where to be thin was to be successful. Their greatest merriment was chatting about which person in the neighborhood up to which celebrity had gained a fraction of a pound. They cackled with merriment whenever they thought that Caroline Kennedy or Princess Anne or Carrie Fisher (age 5) was becoming a ” chubette”. That was over 60 years ago. A decade or two later my mother is telling me that I was “just like Valerie Bertinelli” which was her code for insinuating that a size 10 is elephantine.
I spent decades of my life being taught that women should be as splendid as possible and a 20 inch waist line was a failure because no woman can have a waist that is not in the teens: (13-19 inch circumference)’
Why do people do this? Don’t they see how much misery their words convey?
There are a lot of genetic and class differences between the thin and the fat. Opera divas have been shamed into extreme dieting. There are millions of women wearing between size 4 and size XXX4 who have been conditioned to thinking they are “fat”.
Why have we made the margin of error so razor thin that many talented women depend on the state of their weight to maintain their position?
I, of course, love Valerie Bertinelli.
I’m old enough to remember TV Guide. They had an interview with Bertinelli, and she seemed under so much pressure. She was smoking, then begged the interviewer, “Don’t print that I smoke!” because of her reputation. She rubbed her thigh and lamented, “Eddie likes thin women”; etc. I was just a kid, and previously thought she must have a charmed life (great sitcom, beautiful, etc.), but that interview was my first eye-opener about the Hollywood lifestyle.
I have always thought she was adorable. She was too good for Eddie and he knew it.