What are some better alternatives to nesting if statements when comparing 2 values?

Sorry for the wordy title, but I couldn't think of a better way to phrase it. I am comparing 2 values within an if statement. While I would normally do something like this

val = 1

work = input('1 or 2' )
if work == '1':
  #must compare value of val
  if val == 1:
    print('Val is equal to  1')
elif work == '2':
  if val == 2:
   print('val is equal to 2 ')
   #also also compare value of val

All the tutorials say that nesting ifs is a bad practice and will come back to bite you. Is there a better way to do this?