Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life by Valerie Bertinelli Read Free Book Online

and wanted to be with him romantically, I wondered how he could fall in love with me when I didn’t love myself. I laughed the first time I saw him naked. He had a fine body, but I was nervous, and I have always dealt with stress by cracking jokes. If he had laughed at me, I would have been devastated.
    But he didn’t get a chance to see me when I finally stripped to my birthday suit. I made sure the bedroom was dark, the drapeswere pulled, and the lights were off. If I hadn’t been wrapped around him, he would have needed a seeing-eye dog to find me. Tom was allowed to bump into me, but he couldn’t look. It was ridiculous, but it was a process that I needed to go through, and fortunately he was patient enough to put up with me until I quit paying attention to whether the drapes were up or down.
    Eventually, I realized the lights had never mattered. It was all about how I saw myself when I shut my eyes and looked at myself from the inside out.
    While promoting
Losing It
in different cities, I kept wondering how truly comfortable I was inside my new 132-pound body. It was stupid. I really did like myself better and I was happy with the improvements I had made. I spent all day telling people that, Yeah, I did it and I was proud of myself. And that was true. Yet alone at night in the hotel room, I looked through fashion magazines and battled feelings of inadequacy and fears that I was a fake. I wondered, What the eff was going on?
    How could I feel both good about myself and on the verge of a freak out? But hey, as I had to realize, life was full of contradictions and self-doubt, thrills, and victories. I had to get used to the fact that it wasn’t always a perfect picture. A diet is a process of gradual change, and even though it had taken ten months to get where I was, this new lighter me was still too new for me to completely accept or trust.
    Never mind the fashion magazines. I also had a hard time with the room service menu. Everything I ever fantasized about doing in a hotel room was listed on the left side and the right side of that tall, slender menu. I closed my eyes and imagined ordering up the most illicit threesome: a starter, an entrée,
and
dessert!
    Talk about temptation. But that’s when I would ask myself which version of myself I liked, the new or the old, the fit or the fat, the size 6 or the size 14; then, drawing on every ounce of willpower and self-discipline, I would order up salmon with NO butter and a side of vegetables, and “please, no bread.”
    Tom was always helpful on the phone when I was traveling without him, and he offered even more strength when he was with me. I also made sure to stay at hotels with gyms. I had lost weight, but I was still fighting the battle.
    Getting naked, as I came to define it, was all about being honest with myself. By the time Wolfie walked in on me in the bathroom, he knew flaws of mine that were worse than any insecurity I had about my body. He had seen me lose my temper, cry from frustration and loneliness, and sit on the couch and stuff my face as if I could never get full. In other words, he had seen way more than my boobs.
    We all show more of ourselves than we realize. One time, I pulled off the freeway near my house and stopped at the bottom of the off-ramp. A disheveled man stood off to the side. As soon as we made eye contact, he opened his coat and flashed me. He was completely naked underneath. Shocked, I sped off before waiting for the light to change.
    In the aftermath, though, I remembered the pain and desperation in his eyes rather than anything else I saw. He had exposed much more than his body.
    When I was on the series
Touched by an Angel
, I wore so many layers of clothing to hide my embarrassing girth that I may as well have been peeling an artichoke at the end of the day when I undressed. But the one thing I could never conceal was the unhappiness in my eyes. To this day, when I’m flipping through channelsand come across one of those