Finding It

And Satisfying My Hunger for Life without Opening the Fridge

Valerie Bertinelli

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781439141649
• eBook ISBN:
  9781439159095
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A warm, candid, and deeply relatable memoir from beloved actress and bestselling author Valerie Bertinelli, exploring real-life transformation, family, faith, and the emotional journey of sustaining meaningful change.

Welcome back to chez Bertinelli, where life is as crazy and comical as ever. In revealing talks with her longtime boyfriend, Tom, Valerie gets even more personal about her inner worries: her maternal anxieties about her son, Wolfie (he’s fallen in love and, as she writes, “getting your sex talk from Eddie Van Halen wasn’t recommended in any of the parenting books I read”); the challenges of dealing with a blended family; her mother’s own new diet adventure; and a craving for a deeper relationship with a Higher Power (“I have experienced days of inner peace and connectedness with a larger spirit—twice,” she writes. “Why not more often?”). And as if these everyday challenges weren't enough, Valerie is working to maintain her own very public weight loss. She even gets to thinking she might kick it up a notch, shed more weight, and get so buff she can wear a bikini—in public.

In this new, inspiring memoir from the beloved actress and author of the bestseller Losing It, Valerie tells the story of what happens after you change your life. It’s not all peaches and cream, or even nonfat yogurt.

In Finding It, Valerie comes face-to-face with hard questions of family, faith, and beachwear, and realizes that she’s hungering for another transformation—to become better, not just thinner. Forget the scale; the real change is happening inside, and Valerie realizes that this is the part of dieting that no one ever talks about—the reality of keeping the pounds off. Dieting fixes one problem, she discovers, but to maintain that weight loss, she has to work on everything else—all the reasons she got fat in the first place. Warm and friendly, honest, and self-aware—like a talk with your BFF—Finding It tells of the common worries and frustrations, the funny and fabulous moments in Valerie’s publicly private life. Humorous and humble, it is also the emotional story of family and the deep bonds and patterns that persist through generations: for as Valerie transitions to her latest role of motherhood with an increasingly independent son, she connects with her own mother in a profound new way.

With the same winning wit and candor that touched several generations of fans in Losing It, Finding It is an optimistic story for trying times. It’s about believing in love and happiness, having faith that both are possible, and finding out that God does want you to enjoy life’s desserts—even when you’re on a diet.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Faith
• Part Two: Belief
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author