Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy is a figure in Lindy West’s account of learning to see fat bodies differently. His significance rests on The Full Body Project: black-and-white photographs of fat, naked women laughing, embracing, smiling, and looking directly at the camera. West encounters the images while struggling with the shame and limitations imposed on her own body. Their force lies not in an argument about her body, but in showing it—and bodies like it—without scorn.

The Full Body Project

The photographs depict their subjects as people inhabiting their bodies, rather than as punch lines or warnings. In one image, the women sway like the Three Graces; in another, they recreate Herb Ritts’s famous arrangement of supermodels. The contrast is deliberate in its effect: a form traditionally associated with idealized beauty is made to include fat women, while the women’s expressions and gestures convey ease, pleasure, and directness. West identifies this as the first time she had seen fat women presented without contempt.

That distinction matters because the images do not ask their viewers to overlook the women’s size in order to value them. Their bodies remain visible. What changes is the frame around that visibility: the photographs offer dignity and beauty where West had learned to expect ridicule or concealment. In recalling Nimoy’s account of asking his models to be proud, West recognizes that pride might be possible for her, too—not only pride in what she had achieved despite her body, but pride in the body itself.

West’s First Encounter

West first clicks through the images, skims them, and leaves. She returns to them. Her hesitation captures the learned discomfort that the project unsettles: she wonders why these bodies are being shown, since she has internalized the expectation that they should remain hidden. The encounter is therefore not an uncomplicated conversion. The photographs draw her back even as she feels exposed by what they reveal.

As she continues looking, something in her begins to loosen. She considers whether her body might not need to be a secret and whether the judgment of her worth could be removed from the hands of people who despise fatness. That thought leads to a practical consequence: when her nutrition teacher offers another session, West does not sign up. The images have not supplied a medical solution or made her dislike of being fat disappear. They have helped her question the premise that she must keep pursuing a cure in order to deserve value.

From Shame to Recognition

The Full Body Project becomes the starting point for a wider change in how West encounters images of fat people. She begins looking through fat-positive tags on Tumblr and discovers the photo blog Hey, Fat Chick, run by Frances Lockie. Its ordinary pictures—fat women of different sizes dressing, doing things, and smiling—extend what Nimoy’s photographs first made possible. West describes them as a form of joy and medicine: repeated exposure gradually loosens her shame.

The progression is important. At first, she stops responding to visible fatness with immediate embarrassment. Then the bodies become ordinary to her, neither obscene nor extraordinary. Eventually she sees them as beautiful and wants to inhabit the same visual freedom: wearing a crop top, appearing in lingerie, and refusing the assumption that women’s bodies exist for other people’s consumption. Nimoy’s work is one part of that process, not its sole cause; West places it at the beginning of a continuing encounter with representation that changes what she can recognize and desire.

Narrative and Cultural Significance

West connects the project’s personal effect to a larger culture that treats fatness as grounds for shame and treats public concern about health as permission to demean fat people. In her account, The Full Body Project interrupts that logic by making fat women visible as subjects of beauty and pride. Its importance is not that it resolves the material difficulties or hostility West describes elsewhere, but that it gives her an image against which those judgments can be questioned.

The photographs also establish a pattern that recurs in West’s discussion of representation: seeing people like oneself depicted with dignity can alter the terms through which one understands one’s own body. Nimoy’s role is consequently brief but decisive. He appears through the work and through West’s recollection of his request that the models be proud; the lasting narrative action belongs to the images as West returns to them, refuses another round of dieting instruction, and begins to imagine her body as valuable and politically consequential.