Valerie's moment of truth about her weight gain came when she sat down to watch herself star in a Hallmark Channel movie called
Claire. "I felt the urge to run into my room and cry. The sight of myself was too much for me to tolerate," she says.
A few weeks later, Valerie says she began visualizing the person she wanted to be, inside and out. "There's the weight you see on the scale every morning, and then there's the weight you carry around inside," she says. "One makes you look miserable. The other makes you feel miserable. Beyond the picture I envisioned in my head, I really prayed for a lightness of being."
Soon after using the law of attraction to envision how she wanted to look and feel, Valerie signed on as a spokeswoman for Jenny Craig™ and appeared in commercials with
Kirstie Alley. "[I thought] this might be just what I need to kick myself in the butt and be accountable because I'm certainly not accountable to myself," she says. "If I'm accountable to other people, then maybe I can finally do this and change my life. And that's what happened."
When Oprah asks Valerie if the photo on the cover of her book is who she envisioned all along, Valerie tears up. "I'm having an aha! moment right here," she says. "That's who I visualized...but naked."
