The question “how did Valerie Bertinelli lose weight” has a surprisingly complicated answer. Because the truth is, she has lost weight multiple times, gained it back, lost it again, and spent the better part of five decades at war with her own body before finally calling a truce.
She is 65 years old. She has navigated two divorces, grief, emotional eating, a firing from a diet company, and the kind of relentless public scrutiny that most of us will never know. And the version of Valerie Bertinelli who exists today, the one posting underwear selfies on Instagram and writing books about radical self-acceptance, is the one she worked hardest to become.
This is not a list of diet tips. This is the full, honest story of how she got here.
The Weight That Was Never Just About Weight
Before getting into methods and pounds lost, you need to understand something Valerie has said clearly across dozens of interviews: for her, food was never really about food.
It was about grief. About a marriage that struggled for years before ending. About a fifth-grade teacher who poked her belly and warned her to watch it. About a father whose love she felt was conditional on her mother’s size. About a childhood spent in the spotlight being compared to thinner co-stars.
In her 2022 memoir “Enough Already,” she wrote about watching her father treat her mother badly when her mother gained weight. “I learned at a very young age that when you gain weight, you’re not lovable,” she reflected. That belief followed her for fifty years.
She said in a later interview: “When I don’t work on what’s eating me, I’m going to start eating.” That line, perhaps more than anything else she has ever said, explains the entire arc of her story.
Chapter One: Jenny Craig, the Green Bikini, and What She Wishes She Had Done Differently
In 2007, at 47 years old, Valerie Bertinelli became the face of Jenny Craig, taking over from Kirstie Alley as the program’s spokesperson. She committed to eating around 1,200 calories per day and running five times per week. Over nine months, she lost 40 to 50 pounds.
In 2009, she posed in a green bikini on the cover of People magazine. It was a genuine achievement and she worked extremely hard for it.
But she later looked back on that cover with more complicated feelings. “There’s a lot of pride and a lot of shame associated with that cover,” she told People in 2020. “I worked really, really, really hard. Physically definitely. I wish to God I had worked just as hard on my mental shape.”
Because the emotional work was not being done. The number on the scale had changed. The wound underneath had not.
The Firing That She Still Gets Emotional About
By 2012, when Valerie was inducted onto the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the weight had crept back. She wore a size 12 to the ceremony. She told The Drew Barrymore Show in early 2026 that she “felt so horrified” at what should have been one of the proudest days of her career.
Shortly after, the diet company made its position clear. “They fired me,” she said. “Eventually they said, ‘We can’t keep going with you because you’re gaining weight again.'” She got emotional recounting the story, even years later.
It is a striking moment in her narrative. Here was a woman being publicly punished, in her professional life, for being human. For gaining weight like most people do when life gets hard. For not being, as she put it, a size four, which was “way too small for me and impossible to maintain.”
Chapter Two: The Emotional Eating Pattern She Finally Named
Between the green bikini cover and her second divorce in 2022, Valerie went through what she now describes as years of cycling between restriction and emotional eating.
She has always been honest about the trigger. It was not laziness or lack of discipline. It was unprocessed pain finding its way out through food.
“I think a lot of people think because I was getting the divorce, that was really the catalyst for gaining so much weight,” she told Today in 2008. She pushed back against that easy explanation. “I had so many problems all through the years, ballooning and going down again. But I think really what my sorrow was, that I wasn’t giving my son the life I thought he deserved and I wasn’t keeping the family intact. And I think I had a lot of grief about that and that was how I soothed myself.”
This is a level of self-awareness that most weight loss conversations completely bypass. She was not eating pizza because she liked pizza. She was eating pizza because she was grieving. And no diet on earth solves grief.
Chapter Three: The Divorce That Became a Turning Point
When Valerie filed for legal separation from her second husband, Tom Vitale, in November 2021, with the divorce finalized in November 2022, something shifted.
She began talking about that month, the month she called being “set free,” as the beginning of a new chapter in her relationship with her body. In a June 2023 Instagram video, she described going down a jean size and said: “And this all started in November, the month I got free. And I started really concentrating on my emotional and mental health. And when I started doing that, I started caring about the nutrition that I put in my body more.”
This is the key sentence in her entire weight loss story. She did not start with the nutrition. She started with the emotional work. The physical changes followed as a byproduct.
So How Did Valerie Bertinelli Actually Lose Weight? The Practical Methods
Once the emotional foundation began to shift, here is what she actually did.
She Stopped Fighting Food
One of the most consistent things Valerie has said in 2024 and beyond is that she stopped treating food as the enemy. Speaking with The Washington Post in April 2024, she said: “It’s not the food that’s bad for us. It’s how, or why, we’re eating it. If we’re eating it unconsciously, if we’re eating it to soothe an emotion.”
She told Mashed in the same month that she was done “putting the burden on the food of being good or bad.” She described being afraid of apples and bananas on previous diets because someone told her the carbs were bad. She stopped that thinking entirely.
She now eats a varied diet built around vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains, with zero restriction-based rules. She eats what her body wants. She has also spoken about how travel with her son Wolfgang’s band makes healthy eating harder, and how she adjusts when she gets home, reaching for salads heavy with vegetables and a lemon vinaigrette.
She Stopped Weighing Herself
In a February 2024 Instagram post, Valerie shared a throwback photo of herself in a purple bikini from 2014, weighing 150 pounds at five feet four inches. The caption was pointed: “I don’t weigh myself anymore because this is considered overweight by whose standards I don’t know. It’s stupid and I believed them for far too long.”
This was not a small decision. For someone who spent decades as a diet spokesperson, for whom the number on the scale had professional consequences, stepping off it entirely was an act of genuine defiance.
She Moved Her Body Without a Race Goal
In 2010, she ran the Boston Marathon to benefit the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, finishing in 5 hours and 14 minutes. More than a decade later, she shared a TikTok of herself walking on a treadmill, saying plainly: “Just 12 years ago, I did a marathon. But you know what? You got to start somewhere, I’m not embarrassed. Today is the first day of the rest of my life.”
She has kept exercise as part of her life without treating it as punishment or making it contingent on a weight goal.
She Did the Therapy Work
This is the part of “how did Valerie Bertinelli lose weight” that almost nobody talks about enough.
In her most recent memoir, “Getting Naked,” released in 2025, she revealed that at age 11 she experienced sexual abuse, which she described as “the wound that started it all.” She wrote that it wove through her marriages, her divorces, her body dysmorphia, and her decades of weight cycling in ways she was only beginning to fully understand.
“I thought if people are going to trust me with what I’ve been through, I need to be brutally honest about it,” she said. She described 2024 as the worst year of her life, one that included four surgeries and significant personal turmoil, but also the intensive therapeutic work that finally brought her into genuine peace with herself.
Her physical transformation is inseparable from this emotional work. They happened together because they had to.
She Rejected Weight Loss Drugs
When weight loss medications became a major cultural conversation around 2023 and 2024, Valerie was asked about them directly. She said she was not interested in Ozempic or any similar quick fix.
Her position was consistent with everything else she has said: sustainable change has to come from inside, not from a syringe.
Where She Is Now
In December 2024, Valerie posted a bathroom mirror selfie in underwear and a bra. The caption spoke directly to her journey: “For the first time in my life, I love my body as it is.”
She acknowledged openly that the body she was looking at in that photo was not the one from the green bikini cover. It was about 20 pounds heavier than that. And her response was, as she put it in an interview, “I don’t care. I look good. Who the f–k cares?”
She is a size 10 now. She said she would have been horrified by that number when she was working with the diet company. Today, she wears it without flinching.
“Health is not a body size. Health is not the number you see on the scale. Your worth as a human being isn’t dictated by your body,” she said on one occasion. On another: “I know what kind of person I am. It doesn’t matter how much I weigh. What matters is who I am, how I treat people. Period.”
The Lesson Worth Taking
How did Valerie Bertinelli lose weight? She stopped trying to lose weight on its own terms and started addressing why she was gaining it in the first place.
She did not find a magic diet. She found a therapist. She found self-compassion. She got a divorce. She stopped looking at a scale. She started listening to her body. She wrote her truth down in books and shared it with the world even when it was painful.
The physical changes came. But they were never the point.
If you are on your own journey and her story resonates, start where she started: not with the food, but with the feeling underneath it. Everything else tends to follow.
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