Valerie Bertinelli’s Underwear Selfie—and the Message Alongside It—Wins the Week

We’ve reached the end of another long week. But before we clock out for the weekend, we’re giving props where they’re due. Here’s to our winners of the week.

It’s worth repeating all year but especially during the holidays, when there’s so much “indulgence vs. resolutions” chatter: Your body is worthy. Don’t take my word for it—ask Valerie Bertinelli. The winner of two Golden Globes and two Daytime Emmys took to Instagram to show off not her body but her confidence, and it marks a beautiful evolution.

Bertinelli, like so many of us, grew up at war with her size. She was fat-shamed by a fifth grade teacher. She was mocked by an ex for her weight. And I knew her not from her sitcom roles but for starring in commercials for Jenny Craig, then showing off how many pounds she’d lost using the system and writing a book about it. It was far from the most harmful messaging I saw in the 2000s, but it created the association in my mind: Valerie Bertinelli = wants to lose weight.

Until she didn’t.

Bertinelli quit dieting in 2020, around her sixtieth birthday, when she realized that while she could still desire to lose weight, she could also love herself as she was. Happiness became the goal, and the basis for a new memoir. She threw away her scale. Comments still got to her, but she worked through it. She released a cookbook of decadent dishes. She told us to “stop starving” ourselves. She recently joined Drew Barrymore and Pamela Anderson in ditching makeup for a day.

Then, on December 2, she uploaded a simple bathroom mirror selfie in her underwear and wrote, “every lump bump wrinkle and saggy part of me just feels acceptance and simple appreciation.” May we all find such peace in 2025!

After the trolls came out, as they are wont to do, Bertinelli responded with grace and compassion, and a reminder that it’s actually slightly more important to be a good person than to be ripped. “To all of you that would sit in judgment of my body, the photo, and my reason for posting it, I hope you find a place in your heart to not judge yourself as harshly as you judge others,” she wrote in the caption of another selfie.

“I have dealt with judgment my entire life starting from when I was a young girl. It has taken me a long time to realize that my judgment, with patient discernment, is the only judgment that counts. More importantly, what is my character like? Am I kind to people?” she continued, stating plainly, “For the first time in my life, I love my body as it is. It’s not the 20-year-old body that I hated and it really is a shame that I hated that beautiful body. Yes, it was a very different body than the one I now inhabit, but it hadn’t yet been through the journey I needed to go through. Even as challenging as it’s been and is, I am grateful for this journey and I wouldn’t trade this body for my 20-year-old body any day.”

I know too many women who inherited body-image issues from their mothers, mothers who don’t grow out of that mindset. If even one of them is inspired to hit pause on the negative self-talk for even a day because of Bertinelli’s posts, what a gift! And if I could tell my younger self that the “Have you called Jenny yet?” lady from TV would be writing movingly about self-acceptance on Instagram, she would probably say, “What’s Instagram?” but she’d also love it.