14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this year, 48-year-old star Valerie Bertinelli did a thing she hadn’t done in almost 30 years and which she thought impossible to do ever again: she appeared on the cover of a widely circulated US magazine in nothing but her swimsuit. It was all possible after losing the extra weight and settling in at 128 pounds, as Valerie says for the latest issue of Health Magazine.
However, the star immediately adds, it’s not losing weight that is terribly difficult, even though she too struggled with hers for many years before finally getting the incredibly results she got. It’s keeping the pounds off that is the real challenge because, once the weight loss goal is achieved, it also becomes easier to give in to temptation. The secret to Valerie staying at her ideal 128 pounds is in that she chooses to feel good by staying healthy.
In the same interview with Health, the star also touches upon the moment when she realized she needed to lose weight or else. “Oh my goodness, who is that ugly, old, fat woman?” she thought when she saw herself in a film three years ago. “And that just made me feel terrible. And ashamed. And I was tired of feeling ashamed. I started to visualize myself, what I knew I could look like – and I didn’t want to look like that person on the screen. So I started to picture what I knew I could look like as a healthy, vibrant woman. A couple of months later, Jenny Craig called,” she adds.
Bertinelli became a Jenny Craig spokesperson and she started to shift the extra weight. The focus, as expected, was on staying healthy and dropping the pounds in a natural manner. Now, she faces probably the hardest challenge of all, that of maintaining her weight which, as mentioned above, she takes very seriously. Of course, like any other woman out there, she does that by allowing herself rare “cheating” days, like days when she can have a sweet treat.
“We can take days to relax and we can have our splurge days, but if we want to treat our bodies well, we have to stay vigilant. It sucks [laughs]. But I’d rather be vigilant now than go through what I’ve been going through my entire life.” Valerie explains. Asked whether she’d ever choose looking good over feeling good, the star doesn’t hesitate one second. “Feeling good, without a doubt. When I feel good, I look better, because it shows from within,” she says.