At 64, Valerie Bertinelli Shares Underwear Selfie to Discuss ‘Acceptance’
Valerie Bertinelli posted a mirror selfie wearing her bra and underwear to chat body acceptance.
She also teased that she plans to share the “madness” her body and health endured this year.
The post was polarizing among fans, to which Bertinelli had a candid response.
Valerie Bertinelli stripped down emotionally and physically in recent Instagram posts. The Food Network star snapped a mirror selfie wearing her bra and underwear to open up about the “madness” her “body has been through this year,” and when the photo garnered a significant reaction, she followed up with a post about body acceptance.
In the initial post, Bertinelli stood in a hotel bathroom with a box of hair dye in hand. “At some point I will talk about the madness my body has been through this year,” she wrote. “But right now every lump bump wrinkle and saggy part of me just feels acceptance and simple appreciation to be standing in front of a mirror in a hotel bathroom in downtown Manhattan ready to color my roots late on a Monday night.”
Fans praised the shot and her for being open and honest. Others wondered why she made the decision to post the photo in the first place. So, the next day, Bertinelli shared a selfie to explain.
She first thanked followers who related to her mission of “empowering ourselves to focus on our own self-acceptance and self-love.” Then, she addressed the criticism. “I have no power over someone else’s judgment of me and now I have no interest. Finally,” she wrote. “It’s taken me almost three years of emotional labor to get to this point mentally and for the first eight months of this year I had physical setbacks.”
Those setbacks are, presumably, what she teased as “madness” in the first selfie, and she’s already posted about a few. For example, in early November, she detailed a workplace fall that left her with a gnarly arm gash. Last week, she showed off a large knee bandage on Instagram Stories, per People, and said that she “fall[s] far too often for someone [her] age.”
Emotionally, she has opened up about the challenges of menopausal mental health. She also decided to give up alcohol and recently shared a “scary” snapshot of her first “really bad” anxiety attack in a while. And those are the things she has shared.
All of those experiences, good or bad, helped Bertinelli lean even further into self-acceptance. “I don’t care what you think of my body. I don’t care what you think about my posting about [the picture],” she wrote. “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. Ever.”
As always, we appreciate Bertinelli’s candor and look forward to hearing the rest of her story.
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