Product Description

Valerie Bertinelli, then: bubbly sitcom star and America's Sweetheart turned tabloid headline and rock star wife. Now: actress, single working mother of teenage rock star, and weight-loss inspiration to millions.

We all knew and loved Valerie Bertinelli years ago when she played girl-next-door cutie Barbara Cooper in the hit TV show One Day at a Time, and then starred in numerous TV movies. From wholesome primetime in America's living rooms, Valerie moved to late nights with the hardest-partying band of the decadent eighties when she became, at twenty, wife to rock guitarist Eddie Van Halen. Losing It is Valerie's frank account of her life backstage and in the spotlight. Here are the ups and downs of teen stardom, of her complicated marriage to a brilliant, tormented musical genius, and of her very public struggle with her weight.

Surprising, uplifting, and empowering, Losing It takes you behind the scenes of Valerie's acting career and marriage, recalling the comforts, friendships, and problems of her television family, her close relationships with her parents and brothers, the stress and worries of being the wife of a rock star, and the joys of motherhood. Like many women, Valerie often remembers the state of her life by the food she ate and the numbers on her scale. So despite her celebrity, Valerie's voice is so down-to-earth, honest, and appealing that you'll feel as if you're talking with a girlfriend over coffee. Funny and candid, Valerie recounts her attempts to maintain a healthy self-image while dealing with social pressures to look and act a certain way, and to overcome career insecurities and relationship problems, all of which will be familiar to the hundreds of thousands of women who struggle every day with these same issues.

From marital turmoil to the joys of a new career, from being named among Penthouse's ten sexiest women in the world to overhearing whispers about her weight gain in the grocery store, this is Valerie's inspiring journey as she finds new love, raises a terrific kid, and motivates other women as a spokesperson for Jenny Craig.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1418 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-25
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Amazon.com
A Note to Amazon Readers (and a Q&A) from Valerie Bertinelli

Dear Amazon Customer,

Glad to see you here and hopefully purchasing my book. I've heard if you buy multiple copies it's a better experience--a better one for me! But seriously, I'm usually on Amazon, too. I've been buying books through the site for ten years. I enjoy reading the reviews. I get a good sense of the book, and I like to hear what other people have to say. Like in a traditional bookstore, I can look at the cover, peek inside the book, and check out the bestseller lists.

Valerie

1. Do you have a favorite character from a book? I love Scout and Atticus from To Kill A Mockingbird.
2. If you can be any character from a book, who would you like to be? I would like to be Scarlett and I would let Rhett know how much I love him.
3. How do you decide what next book you want to read? If it's for my book group, whoever hosts the next gathering picks the book, so it's picked for me seven out of eight times. But on my own, I read reviews and ask people whose taste I like what they're reading.
4. Where's your favorite place to read? Either lying in bed or on the sofa next to the fireplace.
5. What is your favorite genre? I don't really have one.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

Bring Home the Fun

Some people measure depression by the medication they take or the number of times per week they see a therapist. For me, it was different. I measured my depression with baked jalapeño-and-cheddar-cheese poppers, the brand that advertises itself with the slogan "Bring home the fun."

I'd love to meet the person who came up with that line and ask him a question. Is it really fun to see yourself blow up three dress sizes?

I suppose they wouldn't sell as many if their slogan was "Pack on the pounds." On the other hand, they may do OK with a promotion that said "Forget your ex-husband" or "Eat these instead of having sex -- since nobody wants to see your fat bare ass."

During the cold winter months of 2002-03, when I was making Touched by an Angel in Utah, those jalapeño-and-cheese poppers were my Prozac. I was on a significant dosage: at least nine a night and sometimes more. At the grocery store, I saw other women looking at me when I loaded the boxes into my cart from the frozen food case. I could almost hear them thinking Oh my gosh, that's Valerie Bertinelli. And look: she's on those jalapeño poppers.

It was true. There were nights when I OD'd on those poppers. My mouth burned because I couldn't wait for them to cool down after taking them out of the oven. Other times I savored the taste with tiny, almost sensual bites, drawing out the feeling of comfort and escape I got from eating. The bright smile that served me well for so many years went into storage. So did my size 8 jeans. And my 10s. And my 12s. And my -- well, my weight soared past 170 pounds, the highest it had ever been outside of my pregnancy.

Those were some of the darkest days of my life, and I was eating my way through them. By 2001 my marriage to Eddie Van Halen was over after more than twenty years of competing with his rock-and-roll lifestyle for attention. Our fights about his drinking had taken a toll. Discussing and solving our problems used to bring us closer, but now it wore us out. Ultimately, when he failed to help himself by giving up cigarettes after mouth cancer had threatened his life, I knew, sadly, that one way or another I was going to end up on my own.

By then I was working and living in Utah eight months of the year. Full of anger and frustration, I spent at least three nights a week on a plane so I could see our ten-year-old son, Wolfie, who stayed home in Los Angeles to be in school with his friends. That wasn't the way I wanted to live or the type of person I wanted to be. But instead of helping myself, I did the opposite. I ate my misery and turned my misery into a reason for eating.

Overweight, alone, and horribly depressed, I kept eating poppers and everything else in my path. After Touched went off the air, I returned home and became a hermit. I hid from the world, hoping no one would see that I'd gotten fat. In reality, I was hiding from the one person who could help solve my problems: me.

That was hard to believe. Over the years, I'd tried every diet on the bookshelves -- from the grapefruit diet, to Weight Watchers, to the lemon juice and cayenne pepper fast -- and all of them had worked as long as I stayed on them. But once I stopped, the weight came right back, and, unfortunately with a little extra. While I hate to admit it, I was on the verge of giving up and accepting that I was never going to look the way I wanted to -- or feel the way I wanted to either.

I used to say half-jokingly that I was going to give up, move to the mountains, and be the quirky old fat lady down the street with forty-some-odd cats.

I'm glad I didn't. Instead I ended up outing myself on the cover of the April 4, 2007, issue of People magazine by declaring, "I know what you're thinking -- I'm fat." Publicly, it was the start of a diet where the stakes were total humiliation and embarrassment if I failed to reach my goal. Privately, it was, as my fellow Jenny Craiger Kirstie Alley promised, not just a diet but really the start of a journey. She was right.

By any standard, I've enjoyed a charmed life. Even though I gained notoriety by working on TV, I shunned the spotlight in favor of a normal life, driving carpools, volunteering in my son's classroom, making dinner, and trying never to miss my monthly book club get-togethers. Of all the roles I've undertaken, none has been more satisfying than motherhood. I'm as much of a regular gal as people seem to expect -- and I like it that way.

If you walked into my house right now, you'd find my cat Dexter lounging on the sunny floor in the kitchen, a large bowl of fruit on the counter, delicious-smelling vegetable soup simmering in a tall pot on the stove, the recycling trash can ready to be emptied, and paperwork and schoolbooks spread across the dining room table. You'd also see my boyfriend Tom on the phone in the backroom, and me working the crossword puzzle, as is my daily routine.

Creating this happy picture was a puzzle that took my entire adult life till now to solve. By the time I went public as a size 14, I'd already done the hard work: confronting the fears, insecurities, disappointments, and frustrations that accounted for the three different sizes of dresses and pants I needed in my closet for my constantly changing weight. After that, it was just a matter of portion control, exercise, and self-discipline.

Since going on Jenny Craig in March 2007, I've surpassed my original goal of 30 pounds and set new targets for myself. But the weight I've lost doesn't compare to what I've gained -- or regained -- in my life. The weight loss and renewed zest for life go hand in hand. Kirstie had promised as much when she said, "Valerie, it's not about the weight. -What's going to happen is -you're going to quit hiding and discover the real you."

She was right. My relationships have never been healthier, including the one I have with myself, and I've finally found a joy that seemed beyond my grasp when I was reaching for those jalapeño-and-cheese poppers. Physically and emotionally, I'm a different person. It's like I'm hitting my stride. These days I really do bring home the fun.

In this book, you won't find me professing to have all the answers to life's problems. Hey, I'm still trying to figure out most of those. Instead this story is about the choices I've made, good and bad, and how I've grown and learned from them. There are also exciting times, emotional moments, and life as it happened. Through it all, you'll get me uncensored and unfiltered -- the good, bad, stupid, stubborn, size 14 and size 4. It's nothing more complicated, though as you'll see, it was complicated enough for me. Isn't it always that way?

If you're starving right now because -you're on a diet, ask yourself if your hunger has anything to do with food. I know the answer to that question. Look, we're all human. We go through the same things. If -you're in a dark place over some problem in your life, I hope that reading my story will help you feel less alone when you see that someone else has made the same mistakes and gotten through them. I hope -you'll relate to my story, learn from it, and, as I finally did, find the courage to change, shed any unwanted pounds, and gain all the good things you thought impossible.

Now where did I put that bag of chips?

Just kidding.

Valerie Bertinelli
November 2007
132 pounds

From Losing It by Valerie Bertinelli. Copyright © 2008 by Valerie Bertinelli. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Empty Calories
Lite on insight, long on product plugs, this vapid autobiography appears to have been ghostwritten by Jenny Craig's publishing division. Even the title sounds like blatant promotion for the weight-loss plan.

Although once an appealing television personality, Bertinelli now seems content to be a self-absorbed diet shill who spends as much time here dithering over her yoyo-ing waistline as she does her declining acting career and failed marriage to a coke-snorting rock star. Then one day she discovered Jenny Craig. . . and the rest reads like the world's longest People magazine profile. Look elsewhere for anything remotely resembling a shocking revelation--Bertinelli foolishly revealed all the juicy parts (and there weren't that many to begin with) on TV during a pre-publication media publicity blitz.

So what we're left with here is a book-length paid ad for Jenny Craig--only readers are the ones footing the bill. The corporate brown-nosing ranges from Bertinelli's alleged admiration for Kirstie Alley's "success" on Craig's diet plan (Huh??? Has she looked at a tabloid lately?) to the inclusion of an unflattering, out-of-focus shot of Jenny herself, accompanied by the ridiculous caption "Isn't she beautiful?" (No, at least not here.) And--did she mention?--Valerie really does love Jenny's cuisine!

Yet despite her alleged new-found grasp of responsible eating, Bertinelli is apparently so busy admiring her svelte self in a mirror that she has somehow failed to realize that her seriously overweight son Wolfie now looks like a teenage Jenny Craig spokesperson just waiting to happen. And, with Mom's connections, maybe he will.

Shall be interesting to see whether she maintains her weight loss once her Craig contract expires and the TV talk shows have moved on to weightier matters than the dial reading on her bathroom scale.

Losing It....Lost it...
IN my opinion Valerie could have been moe forthcoming with additional information in numerous places of this book. Although I enjoyed this book, it seems that everytime I was waiting for the big finish to a story or wanted more information, she would fail to follow up with details. Perhaps due to the fact that I am an investigator I get easily annoyed with half stories. Seems to me that if you are in half way then you either go all in or not in at all. You choose.

Loosing it and gaining my life back one pound at a time
I ordered this book in March, it is now July and no book!!! I contacted the seller but I might as well saved my energy!!! They stole my money and I got nothing in return. Amazon should ban crooked people like this from using their web site to scam people!!!!!!!!!! Thanks for nothing!!!!