Valerie Bertinelli still has the green bikini from the most famous photo shoot of her life. It sits folded in a drawer. And she wants people to know one thing about it: it was a size large.

“Even at the lowest weight I’ve been in decades, I was still wearing a large,” she told People. “Everybody’s shape is what we should be celebrating.”

That lands differently now than it did in April 2009, when Bertinelli appeared on the cover of People in that bikini after losing roughly 40 pounds as a paid diet-company spokesperson. Millions of American women looked at it as proof it could be done.

She has spent the years since telling them what it actually cost.

The Shoot Ended. The Weight Came Straight Back.

“I started to gain weight as soon as the photo shoot ended,” Bertinelli wrote in her 2022 memoir Enough Already. “I was starving myself and doing twice a day workouts. Some people can look like that without doing that but not me.”

Then the sentence that has followed her ever since: “And there is shame for being part of the problem to make other people think they could do it.”

She signed with the diet company at 47, and she has been blunt about why. She had split from Eddie Van Halen. She refused to take his money. She was a working single mother, and it was a good job.

The weight came off. The reason it had gone on never did.

“I worked really, really, really hard. Physically definitely,” she told People. “I wish to God I had worked just as hard on my mental shape. But when I don’t work on what’s eating me, I’m going to start eating.”

The Teacher Who Poked Her Stomach

Bertinelli traces the wound back long before Hollywood. She has said she watched her father treat her mother badly whenever her mother gained weight. A fifth-grade teacher poked her belly and told her to keep an eye on that.

“So I learned at a very young age that when you gain weight, you’re not lovable,” she said. “And what I’m learning is that your body is not what makes you lovable.”

The turn came after her 2022 divorce from financial planner Tom Vitale. In an Instagram video the following year, she told followers her jeans were getting loose, and pointed to when it started — November, which she called the month she got free.

She had cut back sharply on alcohol. She had started therapy, journaling and mindfulness, and describes humor as part of the work. She has also used rolfing, a deep manipulation of the body’s connective tissue. “It’s so painful,” she said, “but there’s a release that happens that’s really helpful.”

The nutrition followed the emotional work, she said — not the other way around.

She has since gone further and given up drinking entirely. She told AARP that sobriety left her feelings raw, and that an EMDR therapist helped her finally reach childhood trauma she had spent decades eating through.

Then She Took the Bikini Off Entirely

On March 10, 2026, Bertinelli published Getting Naked: The Quiet Work of Becoming Perfectly Imperfect. The cover is a nude black-and-white portrait of her. It became a New York Times bestseller.

Inside, she writes about menopause, having her breast implants removed and the infection that followed, her canceled Emmy-winning cooking show, and a divorce she compares to being the punching bag in a boxing lesson.

She calls the cover her stupid bright idea. She also says posing for it felt better than the bikini did — even though she was 20 pounds lighter then.

“I have felt bad about myself for too many decades,” she told People. “I’m going to feel good about myself now.”

What We Know
2007: Her marriage to Eddie Van Halen ends in divorce. She signs on as a diet-company spokesperson at 47.
April 2009: She appears on the cover of People in a green bikini after losing roughly 40 pounds.
2011: She marries Tom Vitale.
2020: Eddie Van Halen dies of cancer. Bertinelli is at his side.
2022: Her divorce from Vitale is finalized. Enough Already is published.
2023: She credits emotional and mental health work — not dieting — for her changing body, and says she has cut back sharply on alcohol.
2026: She confirms full sobriety to AARP and publishes Getting Naked on March 10, with a nude cover portrait.
Why This Matters

The 2009 cover was not just a celebrity photo. It was marketing, aimed squarely at the millions of American women who buy diet programs every year. It worked because Bertinelli was believable — the girl from One Day at a Time, someone’s daughter, someone’s neighbor.

Now the woman who sold that promise is dismantling it in public at 66. She is saying the number was never the problem. She is saying the size large was there the whole time. She is saying the thing the diet business never says out loud: that she was starving.

For a generation of women who spent the last two decades measuring themselves against that cover, that is not a celebrity update. It is a correction.

“When I don’t work on what’s eating me,” Bertinelli said, “I’m going to start eating.”