Valerie Bertinelli has lived much of her life where millions of people could watch her.
She became famous as a teenager, won major acting awards, married one of rock music’s biggest stars and eventually reinvented herself as a television cooking personality.
Her career has lasted more than five decades.
Yet through many of those years, another subject repeatedly followed her.
Her body.
For decades, Bertinelli’s changing weight became part of the public conversation surrounding her, sometimes receiving almost as much attention as her professional achievements.
At 65, however, she has been trying to tell a different story.
And this time, the number on the scale is not the most important part.
Fame arrived remarkably early
Born on April 23, 1960, Bertinelli began acting professionally while she was still young.
An early appearance on the television series “Apple’s Way” helped put her on the path toward the role that would make her famous.
In 1975, when she was only 15, Bertinelli joined the cast of Norman Lear’s “One Day at a Time.”
She played Barbara Cooper, one of two teenage daughters being raised by their divorced mother, Ann Romano, played by Bonnie Franklin.
Mackenzie Phillips played Barbara’s sister, Julie.
The sitcom became a major success and remained on television for nine seasons.
Suddenly, Bertinelli was growing up in front of an enormous audience.
Recognition followed.
She earned three Golden Globe nominations for her work on the series and won twice, in 1981 and 1982.
She was barely into adulthood.
Then her personal life became famous too.
Eddie Van Halen entered her life
In 1981, Bertinelli married Eddie Van Halen, the celebrated guitarist and co-founder of Van Halen.
They were both young and already living highly public lives.
Their son, Wolfgang Van Halen, was born in 1991.
The marriage ultimately ended, with their divorce finalized in 2007.
But their connection did not disappear.
Bertinelli has spoken openly over the years about the complicated love and friendship that remained between them after their marriage ended.
When Eddie died from cancer in October 2020 at age 65, Bertinelli publicly mourned him.
Their son Wolfgang, meanwhile, developed a music career of his own.
He performed with Van Halen and later created Mammoth, establishing an identity separate from his famous father’s legacy.
For Bertinelli, however, acting remained only one part of an increasingly varied career.
Another reinvention was coming.
Television kept bringing her back
After “One Day at a Time,” Bertinelli appeared in numerous television projects.
She starred in the sitcom “Sydney” and later joined “Touched by an Angel” during its final seasons.
Then, in 2010, she returned to sitcom success with “Hot in Cleveland.”
Bertinelli starred alongside Betty White, Jane Leeves and Wendie Malick in the comedy, which ran for six seasons.
But viewers were also beginning to see another side of her.
Food became an increasingly important part of her television career.
She hosted “Valerie’s Home Cooking” and became a familiar presence on “Kids Baking Championship.”
“Valerie’s Home Cooking” earned her two Daytime Emmy Awards.
And in 2012, Bertinelli received another major recognition for her decades in entertainment: a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
By almost any professional measure, her career had been remarkably successful.
Yet something far more personal continued occupying headlines.
Her weight became a public story
Bertinelli has said that concerns about her body began long before she became a celebrity.
She has recalled receiving comments about her weight when she was still a child.
Once she became a television star, the scrutiny became much more public.
Her appearance could become a topic of discussion in interviews, magazines and entertainment coverage.
Eventually, her efforts to lose weight became public as well.
In 2007, Bertinelli became a spokesperson for Jenny Craig.
She lost more than 40 pounds during the highly publicized program.
Then came a photograph that would follow her for years.
In 2009, shortly before turning 49, Bertinelli posed in a green bikini for People.
At the time, the images appeared to represent the successful conclusion of a dramatic physical transformation.
But years later, Bertinelli revealed another side of that moment.
And it changed the meaning of the photograph.
The picture did not tell the whole story
Looking back, Bertinelli said maintaining the body seen in those photographs required an approach she no longer considered healthy for herself.
She described being extremely restrictive with food and exercising intensely.
After the photo shoot, her weight began changing again.
That experience eventually led her toward a realization.
She had spent enormous energy working on her physical appearance.
But she had not put the same amount of effort into understanding what was happening emotionally.
The issue, she came to believe, went deeper than food.
For years, Bertinelli had connected thinness with acceptance.
Now she wanted to understand why.
Learning where those beliefs began
Bertinelli has discussed receiving negative messages about weight from an early age.
She has recalled a teacher commenting on her stomach when she was in elementary school.
She has also spoken about observing how weight affected relationships within her family.
Then came Hollywood.
Being photographed and discussed publicly reinforced the idea that her appearance was something everyone else was entitled to evaluate.
Gradually, she began questioning that belief.
What if someone’s body was never what made that person worthy of love in the first place?
That question became increasingly central to the way Bertinelli talked about health.
Then another major life change arrived.
Starting again after divorce
Bertinelli married Tom Vitale in 2011.
Their relationship later ended, and their divorce was finalized in November 2022.
Afterward, Bertinelli began speaking frequently about emotional recovery and rebuilding her relationship with herself.
She discussed therapy.
She journaled.
She explored meditation and mindfulness.
She also talked about rolfing, a form of bodywork involving manipulation of connective tissue.
On social media, Bertinelli discussed emotional and mental abuse in general terms and the difficulty people can have recognizing unhealthy patterns when there is no physical violence.
She did not always identify a specific individual when making those comments, an important distinction when recounting her story.
What she consistently emphasized was her own healing.
Then something else started happening.
Her body began changing too.
Smaller jeans — but a very different message
In 2023, Bertinelli shared that she might need to move down another jeans size.
Years earlier, that might have become a conventional celebrity weight-loss story.
But she presented it differently.
Bertinelli said she had begun concentrating seriously on her emotional and mental well-being after her divorce.
As that changed, she said she became more attentive to what she was putting into her body.
She also revealed that she had significantly reduced her alcohol consumption.
Her clothes becoming looser was noticeable.
But she no longer wanted weight loss to be the entire story.
The bigger change was happening somewhere a scale could not measure.
At 65, the message has changed again
By 2026, Bertinelli was publicly exploring self-acceptance from another perspective.
Her memoir “Getting Naked” focuses on vulnerability, aging, emotional healing and learning to accept herself.
For the book’s cover, she posed nude at 65.
The significance was not simply that she was willing to show her body.
It was how differently she felt about doing it.
Bertinelli has contrasted the experience with her famous green-bikini photo shoot years earlier.
Back then, she had reached a lower weight but was still struggling internally.
Now she was older and approaching her body with a different attitude.
The goal was no longer perfection.
It was acceptance.
The green bikini still carries a lesson
Bertinelli has said she kept the green bikini from the famous 2009 photo shoot.
There is an interesting detail about it.
Even at one of her lowest weights in decades, she said the bikini was a size large.
For Bertinelli, that became another reminder of how misleading clothing sizes can be when they are treated as measurements of personal worth.
Bodies are built differently.
That reality sounds simple.
Accepting it took her much longer.
A career larger than a clothing size
It is easy to reduce Bertinelli’s story to before-and-after photographs.
Doing so misses most of it.
She has worked in entertainment for more than 50 years.
She became a television star while still a teenager.
She won two Golden Globes.
She later earned two Daytime Emmys.
She received a Hollywood Walk of Fame star.
She successfully moved from acting into food television and writing.
She raised a son who developed his own successful career in music.
And through much of it, she was navigating private insecurities under unusually public scrutiny.
Today, Bertinelli’s message about her body sounds considerably different from the one associated with her earlier weight-loss campaigns.
She still talks about nutrition.
She still values movement and physical health.
But she increasingly describes those things as ways to care for herself rather than punish herself into becoming smaller.
That distinction may be the most important transformation of all.
For decades, people watched Valerie Bertinelli’s body change.
She gained weight.
She lost weight.
She posed for photographs.
And the cycle repeatedly became news.
At 65, she appears to be measuring progress differently.
Not by the number inside her jeans.
Not by the number on a bathroom scale.
And not by whether strangers approve of what they see.
After spending most of her life in front of an audience, Bertinelli’s latest chapter is about something much quieter.
Learning to feel at home with herself.
And unlike the transformations that came before it, this one cannot be captured in a before-and-after photograph.
