Valerie Bertinelli says she is over obsessing about the scale: 'It shouldn’t matter what I look like'

Valerie Bertinelli wants to be kind to herself no matter what her body weighs.

The One Day at a Time alum penned an essay for New Beauty in which she described feeling less-than-confident in her own skin, especially when she was not at her ideal weight.

“For me, the big thing is my weight — it’s the thing that holds me back. But I want to start feeling the same about myself — no matter what weight I am,” she wrote. “I don’t have to wait until I’ve lost weight to be kind to myself and to be kind to others. It shouldn’t matter what I look like. I’m trying to make that a reality in my life, and then, hopefully, my body will follow.”

Bertinelli, who previously starred with the late Betty White on the sitcom Hot in Cleveland, has talked about struggling to accept her weight before. Her 2022 memoir Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today details how diet culture, as well as a father who valued thinness, made her feel insecure in her body.

She told Salon in February that she learned at a “very, very young age” that “when I gain weight, I’m unlovable,” adding that she now realizes that is a “huge lie.”

“The way my father treated my mother when she would gain weight wasn’t very kind,” she explained. “What they did to me as a young child is they gave me a core memory of how to be accepted. ‘Don’t gain weight, that will make you unlovable.’”

Bertinelli wrote in her New Beauty essay that she is trying hard to break that mindset and instead focus on living a healthier life.

“I’m doing my best to live by the words I’ve written, to not care what the scale says. I think that’s important. I think many, many, many people live with a lie that we were told, that we’re unlovable when we gain weight, and it’s simply not true,” she noted. “Yet, even as I say it, I’m like, ‘Now, wait a minute…’ Maybe, one day, I’ll be the perfect weight! Let’s wait until then…”

She added that she now knows that “the number on the scale is never low enough.”

“I stopped weighing myself when I finished writing my book, which was a big thing for me, and I haven’t gotten on a scale since,” Bertinelli wrote. “My clothes still fit; my jeans still zip up. I guess I was afraid that if I didn’t see what number I was and if I wasn’t able to keep an eye on it, that I would balloon up…but that hasn’t happened.”

In July 2021, Bertinelli previously spoke about her past contributing to diet culture by working as a spokesperson for the company Jenny Craig after she received critical comments about her weight.

“I spent 6 years ‘shilling’ for Jenny Craig... I have been buying into the diet industry my whole life and then I became part of the problem, so here I am today receiving the karma of my actions,” she tweeted at the time. “You can go ahead and judge all you like. However, I can warn you, from experience, that kind of karma doesn’t feel great either."

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