The 2000s

The 2000s are the setting for a collision between public anti-fat rhetoric and Lindy West’s gradual rethinking of her own body. As campaigns against obesity made fatness a target of moral and medical judgment, West encountered images that treated fat women with dignity and began to question why strangers should decide her value. The period also includes Dan Savage’s influential commentary on fatness, which made the gap between personal self-worth and popular ideas of health especially visible.

Public Climate

In the mid-to-late 2000s, West describes a national fixation on an obesity epidemic. Fat people were blamed not only for their bodies but also for alleged costs to health care, use of airplane armrests, effects on children, and supposed failures of personal responsibility. Such criticism was often framed as concern for health. West argues that this framing obscured the way stigma itself harmed people, while directing attention away from structural conditions such as poverty, the food system, public infrastructure, and the health-care system.

A Change in How the Body Could Be Seen

Around this time, Leonard Nimoy’s Full Body Project showed West black-and-white photographs of fat, naked women laughing, embracing, and looking directly at the camera. She initially clicked away, then returned to the images, unsettled by the sight of bodies she had been taught to keep hidden. Their presentation as dignified and beautiful, rather than as objects of ridicule, helped her consider that her body did not have to be a secret and that its value need not depend on strangers’ approval. West declined to enroll in another session of the restrictive nutrition program she had been attending. Nimoy’s request that his models be proud helped her imagine pride in her body itself, not merely pride despite it.

Dan Savage and the Period’s Argument

Dan Savage’s writing formed part of the same public climate. In the mid-to-late 2000s, he repeatedly addressed obesity, and West places his views within a widely accepted tendency to treat fat people as appropriate targets of blunt criticism. Savage objected to the claim that a person could be obese and healthy, a position West contrasts with her developing understanding that bodily size does not determine a person’s humanity or worth.

A 2004 column became a focal point of West’s criticism. Savage complained about women, particularly fat women, wearing low-rise jeans and dismissed concerns that stigmatizing language could contribute to eating disorders among young women. He argued that public attention should instead focus on obesity-related illness. West’s account uses the column to show how ridicule could be defended as public-health advocacy, even when its immediate subject was women’s appearance.

The Period’s Significance

The 2000s mark neither a simple turn toward acceptance nor a settled resolution. West continues to describe the pain of being stared at, ignored, or treated as a joke, while also finding strength and power in her own body. The contrast matters: the era’s dominant rhetoric narrowed fatness to a problem requiring correction, whereas the images in Full Body Project made room for pride and presence. Her account places personal change within that wider struggle over who gets to define health, beauty, and human value.