Cooks' Books by Lisa Messinger

"Finding It: And Satisfying My Hunger for Life Without Opening the Fridge" by Valerie Bertinelli (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, $26)

If you play lost and found with Valerie Bertinelli —- author of the best-selling weight loss memoirs "Losing It" and the new "Finding It" — you'll learn a lot more about her than just about calorie counting. The color, size, style and shape of her underwear, for instance — just about everything except "granny panties," those big, oversized, overstretched, nondescript cotton briefs to which many women of all ages over about 30 are accused of resorting.

This literary emptying of her unmentionables drawer, though, as the popular former child actress and star of the '70s hit sitcom "One Day at a Time" calls it — along with just about every word of "Finding It: And Satisfying My Hunger for Life Without Opening the Fridge," her new sequel to the No. 1 New York Times best-seller "Losing It: And Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time" — is charming and, as promised, like chatting with a good friend.

Three are no recipes here (although Bertinelli loves to cook and writes about many family feasts) or real coffee or tea offered, but it feels like a long heart-to-heart over clinking coffee cups. If you read "Losing It," you know that surprisingly the weight loss memoir part takes up only about the last quarter of the engrossing book. The rest is straight autobiography about her TV years, 20-year marriage to ex-husband rocker Eddie Van Halen and raising their now-grown son, who tours with the family mega band.

The losing it section in that book was fairly brief, though the gaining it part got some peppering throughout. All of this over 40 extra pounds on the petite star, who famously took over commercial spokeswoman duties for other flabby TV star Kirstie Alley for diet program Jenny Craig. Alley has gained her weight back. Val — as her friends call her — has kept her weight (that took her about two years to lose) off for more than a year and famously posed recently in an aqua bikini at age 49 (for the first time in 30 years) for a Jenny Craig commercial and the cover of People magazine.

For "Foodies" — those more into the packaged, breaded jalapeno poppers Bertinelli was "addicted" to and her tales of chubby misery — "Finding It" is the meatier of the books. Forget Van Halen and Val's new boyfriend financier Tom — this book is where she rightly comes off as one of the country's biggest experts on weight loss maintenance.

After all, studies show that more than 95 percent of all dieters gain back all the weight they lost and then some.

Bertinelli wisely recognized that maintenance was the true nut to crack.

"Over the years, I had gone on more diets than I could count or even remember," Bertinelli writes. "Every one of them had worked. I had lost weight. But up till now, I had always failed to keep it off. I'm not alone here. Millions of people know what I'm talking about. Everyone who has gone on a diet knows how to lose weight. ... That's insane. It's a problem. And it begs the question, what are we doing wrong?

"One day, I said to myself, 'Holy crap! I've been here before and messed up. What had I done wrong? What do I have to do different this time to keep the weight off?

"Well, as far as I'm concerned, this is the part of weight loss that no one ever talks about: the reality of keeping it off. I think the reason why so many of us have always gained back our weight after months of hard work, self-discipline, and sweat is that we don't know what to do once we hit our goal. We aren't given this crucial information."

Bertinelli's book is packed with her own hard-won insights, along with plenty of humor and tear-jerking passages. She peppers her journey with sidebars titled "Notes to Myself" that are her thoughts, as she had them, as though jotted down on napkins, which some undoubtedly were. Her development is apparent throughout, like "Here's a logical progression: be accountable for the food you eat, be accountable for the words you speak, be accountable for the life you live."

The true growth, though, shines through most in the stories she tells of her life this last year: her son falling in love and her transition as a mom as he grows up, the further blending of her longtime boyfriend's four kids into her own life, her mother's illness and her own countdown to that big bikini moment. Everyone should relate to the trying to fit in almost impossible weight loss maintenance with stressful everyday life issues like these. This is, of course, Bertinelli's true "one day at a time."

Lisa Messinger is a first-place winner in food writing from the Association of Food Journalists and the author of seven food books, including "Mrs. Cubbison's Best Stuffing Cookbook" and "The Sourdough Bread Bowl Cookbook." She also writes the Creators News Service "After-Work Gourmet" column. To find out more about Lisa Messinger and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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