Many people stopped mid-scroll when Valerie Bertinelli shared a picture of herself in her bra and underwear in front of a bathroom mirror in late 2024. It was because of the caption, not because it was scandalous. She wrote that “every lump, bump, wrinkle, and saggy part” of her body is something she loves and accepts. It was a different kind of statement for a woman who was publicly scrutinized every time the scale moved, lost almost fifty pounds on national television, and served as a Jenny Craig spokesperson for decades. Silent. Individual. A bit rebellious.
How did Valerie Bertinelli reduce her body weight? For the better part of thirty years, that question has followed her. It turns out that the truth is more nuanced than any meal plan could account for.
The 66-year-old Bertinelli spent her earlier decades fulfilling the demands of the diet industry. She used portion-controlled meals, push-ups, and tricep dips to lose nearly fifty pounds while serving as a Jenny Craig ambassador in the mid-2000s. She cheerfully and candidly documented her weight loss, making her incredibly relatable. For a while, it was effective. However, the weight returned, as it usually does. With more cameras focused on it, the cycle unfolded as it does for millions of people.
Eventually, it wasn’t a new program that made the difference. It was counseling, as well as journaling. She has also frequently mentioned the difficult, drawn-out process of determining why she was eating in the first place. “What changes your jean size is how you use food to deny your feelings and numb your feelings, period,” she said to Mashed in 2024. “And until I learned that, my life is not going to change.” She doesn’t use any wellness-brand terminology or carefully crafted message, which has a disarming quality. Just someone who at last identified the real issue.
In actuality, she also changed her habits. She reduced her alcohol intake and eventually stopped drinking for periods of time. In January 2023, she posted about how drastically it affected her body. She started eating whole foods that actually required cooking, which she is skilled at, instead of the frozen pizzas and grocery store sushi she had been reaching for during more difficult emotional moments. She started incorporating Pilates into her daily routine. It’s not radical at all. The motivation behind it—eating to nourish rather than to calm oneself—was what changed.
In several interviews, she has made it clear that she does not take GLP-1 drugs. “I don’t judge anybody for how they lose weight,” she stated in an early 2026 interview with People. “It’s flippin’ hard to do.” She seems to be attempting to apply that generosity of spirit—the lack of judgment she shows to others—to herself, which is apparently the more difficult path. Perhaps this is what true change looks like: a gradual softening of the inner voice that told her she wasn’t enough for decades, rather than a dramatic before-and-after.
It’s worth considering the possibility that she’s finished using the scale. Despite being about the same weight as when she was Jenny Craig, she claimed to feel lighter in a widely shared Instagram post from 2023. “So it is not about the number on the scale,” she said. “I feel lighter in my heart. My head feels lighter. That reframe felt almost radical to someone whose weight had been a public metric for so long. She had been measured for years, and now she was claiming that the measurements had always been inaccurate.
Observing all of this, it seems as though Bertinelli’s story has evolved beyond a celebrity weight loss narrative. The women who follow her are typically in their 40s, 50s, and 60s; they have also spent years being told that their bodies needed to be fixed, and they are starting to question whether that was ever the point.
She put it simply in an Instagram post from December 2024: “For the first time in my life, I love my body as it is.” Not her twenty-year-old body, which she now claims she wasted detesting. The body she currently possesses, following all of its experiences. That is not insignificant. In fact, that may be the entire solution.
