Food Network Star Opens Up About Getting Plastic Surgery After Weight Loss

Food Network star Valerie Bertinelli revealed in her new memoir that losing weight triggered her to say goodbye to her breast implants.

Bertinelli, 65, called 2024 “the worst year” of her life in an interview to promote her memoir, Getting Naked: The Quiet Work of Becoming Perfectly Imperfect.

In the book, which releases March 10 and features a strategically nude portrait of Bertinelli on its cover, the actress writes about her difficult childhood, getting older, and striving for self-acceptance in an industry not known for its benevolence.

At one point in Getting Naked, she details her breast augmentation journey.

“I had four surgeries within six months. My hair started to fall out. I was having emotional trouble with people in my life,” the Golden Globe winner said in the on-camera interview, which was posted to People magazine’s YouTube channel on Wednesday.

“I liked it for a little while and then started to hate it,” she told People.

Bertinelli, who rose to fame on the long-running soap opera One Day at a Time, first underwent breast implant surgery in the late 1980s.

After suffering a fall in 2024, however, she decided to remove them.

“At a certain point, I had gained and lost so much weight that my boobs were just ... I felt like they were down to my belly button. I was like, ‘I just want my small boobs back,’” she explained.

“The look on my doctor’s face when he finally saw me made me think ‘Oh s--t I guess I should have come in earlier,’” Bertinelli said, adding that the doctor took out the implants as well as the surrounding tissue. “And then my breast became infected and started to cave in on itself. It became a crater.”

“I have to have one more surgery to even them out,” she told People, adding that she, her dog, and her two cats were the only ones looking at her breast.

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“I’ll have to date somebody who can’t see,” she joked, adding, “It was so serious I just had to find the humor in it.”

In addition to medical problems, Bertinelli listed recent events that made that year especially hard.

“Two divorces behind me. I felt like a failure. I didn’t know what love actually meant,” she said, adding, “I lost my job. My parents died. My son’s father died. And then the surgeries.”

Bertinelli married rock star Eddie Van Halen in 1981, and the couple welcomed son Wolfgang, 34, in 1991, before Bertinelli filed for divorce in 2005. Van Halen passed away in 2020.

Bertinelli married businessman Tom Vitale in 2011. Bertinelli filed for divorce in 2022, the same year her Food Network contract was not renewed.

Bertinelli said that in 2024, she was suffering from anxiety attacks and could not find “peaceful happiness.”

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“I lost way too much weight in 2024 because I was so stressed out that I never want to be that weight again,” Bertinelli said, but added that she now has a good relationship with her body.

“I’m finally at a comfortable place where my clothes fit. They’re not too big. They’re not too small. I’m just normal. Even though I have a little pooch, who cares?” she said.

In January, Bertinelli talked about being dropped by a diet company after she gained weight in 2012.

“I had just started a diet program and then became their spokesperson in 2007, and I had lost 50 pounds,” she said on The Drew Barrymore Show, without naming the specific brand.

“Then, life started to get the better of me, and I wasn’t taking care of my mental and emotional health, so the weight started to come back on,” Bertinelli said, adding, “They said, ‘We can’t keep going with you because you’re gaining weight again.’”