Prologue.

Ira Glass
How old were you when you first came out?

Lindy West
[LAUGHS] That's weird to say it like that.

Ira Glass
I know.

Lindy West
I can't really talk about it.

Ira Glass
Yeah, why is that weird? It does seem weird to me too.

Lindy West
Well, because it feels-- to me, it feels--

Ira Glass
OK, here's something that I just heard about, though I guess it's been out there for a little while now. It's the idea that fat people would come out to their friends and family as fat. Like, they would decide, OK, today's the day, going to say it out loud to people, I'm fat.

I heard about this from Lindy West. She's a writer who's been on our program before. Maybe you remember her story about confronting an internet troll.

Coming out as fat is a strange idea, because, of course, people can see if you're fat. It's no secret. It's not like when you come out as gay or transgender. Nobody says to you, dude, I can't believe you're fat. Lindy says it was obvious how big she was.

Lindy West
But I always felt like if I didn't mention it that maybe people wouldn't notice. Or it could just be this sort of polite secret, like, open secret that we didn't address, because it felt so shameful. It just felt impolite to talk about, like me not wanting to burden you with my failure.

Ira Glass
Like, I'm not going to bother you with this.

Lindy West
Yeah, and just give me a little more time. Let's not talk about it, and I promise I'll fix it.

Ira Glass
That's key, she says. As long as you're a fat person who's trying not to be fat, that's acceptable. That's a good fat person. You don't totally admit to yourself you're fat, because, well--

Lindy West
The way that we are taught to think about fatness is that fat is not a permanent state. You're just a thin person who's failing consistently for your whole life.

[LAUGHTER]

So to actually say, OK, I am fat-- and I have been as long as I can remember, so I don't know why I live in this imaginary future where I, you know, someday I'm going to be thin.

Ira Glass
So before you declared to others, OK, I'm fat, how did you see yourself? Did you see yourself as fat? Did you conceive of yourself as fat?

Lindy West
Yeah, but I was determined to not be fat forever. And my worst fear was, what if I am? And then at some point, I just was like, you know, it's fairly likely that I'm going to be fat forever. So why am I putting off figuring out how to live with that? I should, rather than spending all my time counting almonds, why not try to figure out how to be happy now?

Ira Glass
Which means saying to everybody, let's just decide together that, like most fat people, I'll probably always be this way. This is who I am, which-- right now, anyway-- is so rare, it feels like a radical act.

Lindy West
I'm fat.

Ira Glass
It's so weird to actually hear you say I'm fat. I actually heard you say that. I don't think I've ever actually heard somebody just say those words except in a much smaller context, like somebody puts on a dress and it's like, oh, I'm fat. But they don't mean, this is who I am.

Lindy West
Yeah, and it's usually thin people who say that.

Ira Glass
Yeah.

Lindy West
You know?

Ira Glass
Yeah.

When you come out as gay, most people accept it, because they know you can't do anything about that. That's who you are. You can't change it. But coming out as fat, doctors and your family and kind of the entire culture is organized to point out how wrong-headed you are.

When you're over a certain size-- it's been explained to me by a few people now-- complete strangers walk up to you on the street and tell you to lose weight. They shoot you dirty looks when they see ice cream in your shopping cart. They talk down to you like you're stupid about nutrition and calories, as if pretty much every fat person has not been around the block 500 times on that one already.

That's why deciding to stay fat and be OK with it is at a peculiar frontier right now, where things are shifting and people do not agree about what is acceptable to say and think. I was talking to Lindy. I used the word "overweight" a few times.

And at some point, she stopped me and said, the word "overweight" is not preferred. She wasn't strident about this. It was super friendly. She said the problem with "overweight" is that it implies that there is a correct weight for people.

That's how radical this is. It's saying that no weight is better than any other weight, which, given the health risks associated with greater weight that Lindy acknowledges, it can be hard to get your head around. And we're doing this show today because I read the book that Lindy just published about this. And it made me see this whole thing differently.

And so what we're going to do today is we're going to present some excerpts from her book. Her book's called Shrill. And we're going to hear from people who definitely do not feel the same way that Lindy does about all this. For WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Act One. The Day the Scales Fell from Her Eyes.

Ira Glass
Act One, The Day the Scales Fell from Her Eyes. So Lindy West is very much a fat person with a before picture and an after picture. In both pictures, she's fat. In the after picture, she is outspoken and happy. In the before picture, she is painfully shy and not as happy.

She says, as a fat teenager, she felt like a monster. Cool clothes did not seem to exist for her. In her 20s, fat made her world smaller. She'd stay home when friends went hiking, biking, sailing. She'd cancel plans to avoid restaurants whose tables were so close together she couldn't navigate through them.

Lindy West
And then not to mention the fact that you're knocking stuff over. You know, just moving through the world as a big person is hard. I take up a lot of space. It's undeniable. It's awkward and embarrassing. And I'm just constantly knocking stuff over with my butt, you know?

Ira Glass
She describes being fat as simultaneously being way too visible and being invisible-- not wanting people looking at her, noticing her, noticing what she eats. She worried-- and she worries still, all the time-- about destroying chairs by sitting on them.

Lindy West
[SIGH] Chairs.

Ira Glass
You catch that? Until this interview, it never occurred to me that a human being could sigh that way over chairs.

Lindy West
[SIGH] Chairs.

Ira Glass
For the record, she says she's only destroyed one chair. It was at a friend's comedy show.

Lindy West
You know, packed, sold-out theater. And I'm sitting on the stage. And then, of course, the chair made a horrible, loud cracking noise, like, five minutes into the show. And I was already on high alert for the chair. So I managed to sort of leap into a crouch.

[LAUGHTER]

Ira Glass
As if trained for it.

Lindy West
Exactly. It was like Mission Impossible. Because breaking a chair is a combination of so many horrible things. It's like confirmation that you are giant, that furniture cannot withstand you. So it's like falling down, making a scene--

Ira Glass
You're on stage, so people can see you.

Lindy West
Yeah, I'm sure people in the audience-- I mean, well, a guy came running out with a chair.

[LAUGHTER]

Of course.

Ira Glass
Then how do you go about the, like, OK, nothing to look at here, nothing--

[LAUGHTER]

How do you do that?

Lindy West
I don't remember.

Ira Glass
Nothing's going on here.

Lindy West
I think I just started nodding a lot to the comedy, like, ooh, yeah. But those things just make you stronger, Ira.

[LAUGHTER]

Ira Glass
In fact, the question she's asked most often these days is, where do you get your confidence? Which is kind of a messed up question, because the subtext is, if I looked like you, I'd definitely throw myself into the sea. Fact is, though, it is a good question.

How she went from somebody who never wanted to be noticed as fat or at all, to somebody who tells her well-meaning friends that, yes, she wants them to call her fat, even though it makes them feel a little uncomfortable at first. She says it took years, involved many humiliations, things she realized.

But the biggest turning point-- the moment that she actually came out and said to everyone she knows that she's fat-- happened as the result of a fight she got into with her boss-- or, to be more precise, the boss of her boss. She was working at a weekly newspaper, The Stranger, in Seattle. She got into a fight with the paper's editorial director.

His name is Dan Savage. And if you listen to our show a lot, you know him. He's been on many, many times. I've also appeared on his podcast and Vice program, which I recommend wholeheartedly, the Savage Lovecast. He's also written books. He appears on TV.

Dan is friends with Lindy today and had no interest at all in coming on to the radio to revisit this fight that they had a couple years ago. Lindy writes about what happened between them in her book. I asked her to read this part of her story for us here. That's going to be the rest of this act. She says, "Dan was a great boss. But starting around 2004, 2005, he began writing sometimes about obesity." OK, here's Lindy reading.

Lindy West
My boss, Dan, was on something of an obesity epidemic kick. He wasn't alone. The rest of the nation had declared a war on obesity. They'd whipped up a host of reasons why it was right and good to hate fat people-- our repulsive, unsexy bodies, of course, the classic, but also our drain on the health care system, our hogging of plane armrests, our impact on "the children," our pathetic inability and/or monstrous refusal to swap austerity for gluttony, oh, and our health, because they care.

Dan was on that train, and I don't blame him. It was a very popular and, I imagine, gratifying ticket at the time. And even more so than today, it was considered very roguish to tell it like it is about fat people. Dan's main sticking point seemed to be fat people like me who insisted we weren't imminently dying.

He fiercely and persistently defended his, quote, "refusal to take the self-esteem-boosting/public-health-shredding position that you can be obese and healthy. More than anything, this passage from his 2005 book, The Commitment, sums up the overall tone of his stance at the time on fatties. Here's the quote.

"Two days later, in a water park in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, I came to a couple of realizations. First, anyone who denies the existence of the obesity epidemic in the United States hasn't been to a water park in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

The owners of water parks in the US must be saving a fortune on water and chlorine bills. Floating in the deep end of the wave pool with DJ, Terry observed that there was an awful lot of water being displaced. If the South Dakotans floating around us all got out of the pool at the same time, the water level would most likely have dropped 6 feet."

That's what Dan wrote. In other words, we're horrible to look at. We're in the way. We're a joke.

I could probably have dealt with that. But I started to get comments here and there from readers asking how it felt to know that my boss hated me because of my body. I knew Dan didn't hate me. But why didn't he see that when he wrote about fat people he was writing about me, Lindy West, his colleague and friend? And why should I, as an employee, have to swallow that kind of treatment at my job, in the same newspaper I was sweating blood into for 36K a year? Did I want to be the kind of person who didn't fight?

Ira Glass
OK, so I'm going to jump in here. Lindy decided to take a stand. And she did as a culmination of a bunch of experiences and changes in the way that she thought about being fat. And I talked to her about this in our interview.

One of the big things was, she saw these photos taken by the actor Leonard Nimoy, the guy who played Mr. Spock on Star Trek. Late in his life, he did a series of these gorgeous black-and-white photos called The Full Body Project, where he photographed fat women naked.

Lindy West
And they're presented as objects of beauty. They're art photos. And I just had never seen that before ever in my life. It had never occurred to me that you would do anything with a fat body other than hide it. And the women in these photographs were so proud and just full of life. And it really had an impact on me. I mean, at first, I was really uncomfortable.

Ira Glass
Uncomfortable, like, oh, no, don't show that.

Lindy West
Yeah, like, you guys!

[LAUGHTER]

Ira Glass
That's secret!

Lindy West
You guys, I've been working really hard on not showing this to people.

Ira Glass
From there, she started searching the internet with the intensity, she says, of a teenager looking for porn, only she was looking for sites where they posted images of fat people. There's a bunch of Tumblrs along these lines. Some are basically just fashion blogs for fat people. Finding decent clothes is an issue if you're really big. There's a Tumblr called, "hey, fat chick!"

Lindy West
I mean, this was just my favorite one of these fat acceptance blogs. It was just that. It was just bright, happy, funny, smiling people wearing cute outfits. It's just, you're so used to seeing fat people presented as sad and apologetic.

Ira Glass
And what did this do to you? What it do to see that?

Lindy West
I remember feeling like my brain was changing shape. It just had never occurred to me that you could just decide that you were allowed to be happy and live as a--

Ira Glass
As a fat person.

Lindy West
Yeah, exactly.

Ira Glass
And did this change the way that you saw fat people?

Lindy West
Yeah, I mean, I can't even explain how strange it was, because it was like-- it wasn't just conceptual, like, oh, I deserve to be happy. It was like I was looking at specific parts of their bodies and staring at them-- parts of their bodies that I had always just reviled on myself.

Ira Glass
Like, what do you mean?

Lindy West
You know, like fat rolls and arm fat and bellies and staring at them and saying, OK, what if I found that objectively beautiful? What if I decided that's beautiful?

Ira Glass
And then does that work?

Lindy West
Yes, it does. At least, it worked for me.

Ira Glass
And then it really looked beautiful.

Lindy West
Yeah, really. Really, genuinely. And it felt like some sort of sorcery. Like, at the time, I was like, how is this possible?

Ira Glass
Lindy says in her book, "Want to change the way you see fat people? Try it." So that stuff is rewiring her brain, and she's thinking about it a lot. And to get back to our story, her boss is saying these demeaning things about fat people. And she decides, enough. OK, back to her reading. And I'll just say we have unbeeped some words here on the internet version of our show. If you preferred a beeped version, there's one on our website.

Lindy West
Something lurched awake inside of me. A lifetime of being talked down to about nutrition, being kept secret by men I was dating, being both invisible and too visible finally foamed up and spilled over. I emailed Dan privately in November of 2009.

In my memory, I asked him to please, please consider his words more carefully before writing about fat people, to remember that we're human beings with complex lives, not disease vectors or animals. I was timid, pleading. Or at least, that's how I remember it.

While writing about all this, I looked up the original exchange. And it turns out that my memory sucks. Here's the actual email that I sent to my actual boss. "To Dan Savage. Subject-- hello, could you lay off the fat people shit?

Just curious. Who are these hordes of fat people chasing you around, insisting that eating pot pies all day is awesome and good for your health? Because, um, I don't believe you. That sounds like a strawman. And I know some of your best friends are fat or whatever, but you sound like a bigot. Also, your super fucking obvious and regressive point has been made. Everyone in the world already thinks fat people are lazy and gross."

Then I went all caps. "WE GET IT! YOU ARE NOT BREAKING NEW GROUND HERE!" Back to regular case. "Being fat is its own punishment. I don't give a shit if you think I lie on the couch all day under the Dorito funnel. I'd just rather not be abused on the internet from inside my own workplace. Just a thought. Love, Lindy."

Dan's reply was nine words long. He asked simply if I'd ever detected any animus from him personally. "Nope, not at all," I wrote. "Not my point at all either." He said he heard me, but I was accusing him of being a bigot-- a serious charge against someone exhibiting, by my admission, no animus. It was a dodge. He was deliberately missing the point. We never talked about it in the office.

For the next year, he went back to posting semi-regularly about the horrors of the obesity epidemic with no discernible interruption. And I went back to ignoring him. Then Dan wrote a blog post entitled "Ban Fat Marriage." He was responding to some Republicans' argument that gay marriage should be illegal because gay people supposedly die younger.

Here's Dan. Quote, "Why stop with gay people? Iowa should ban fat marriage. There are, according to the state of Iowa, more than 1.4 million obese people living in Iowa. The social costs of Iowa's obesity epidemic are pretty staggering. And those costs include premature death and lower average life expectancies for Iowans."

In response, I threw up a quick blog post. "Hey, Dan. So now that you're equating the stigmatization of fat people with the stigmatization of gay people, does that mean you're going to stop stigmatizing fat people on this blog?" Nothing. I waited a few days. Nothing.

I looked back over our old email exchange. My private confrontation with Dan had gotten me nowhere. Taking a quick, vague swipe at him on the blog had gotten me nowhere. So I did what honestly I thought Dan Savage would do, what he'd taught me to do over my years at the paper.

On February 11, 2011, I wrote a scorched-earth essay and posted it publicly at the tail end of a sunny Friday afternoon. The post was called, "Hello, I Am Fat." It included a full body photo of me taken that day by Kelly O, our staff photographer, with the caption, "28 years old, female, 5 foot 9, 263 pounds."

It read as follows. "This is my body, over there. See it? I have lived in this body my whole life. I have wanted to change this body my whole life.

I get that you think you're actually helping people by contributing to the alp of shame that crushes every fat person every day of their lives. But you're not helping. Shame doesn't work. Diets don't work.

Fat people already are ashamed. It's taken care of. No further manpower needed on the shame front. Thanks."

Then I tore into something Dan wrote about fat rolls. Here's the quote. "I am thoroughly annoyed at having my tame statements of fact-- being heavy is a health risk, rolls of exposed flesh are unsightly-- characterized as hate speech."

Ha! Rolls of exposed flesh are unsightly. That is in no way a tame statement of fact. It's not a fact at all. It's a cruel, subjective opinion.

But this is what's behind this entire thing. It's not about health. It's about "ew." You think fat people are icky. Ew. A fat person might touch you on a plane with their fat. Ew!

Coincidentally, that's the same feeling that drives anti-gay bigots. No matter what excuses they drum up about family values and, yes, health, it's all "ew." And sorry, I reject your "ew." You're not concerned about my health. Because if you were concerned about my health, you would also be concerned about my mental health, which has spent the past 28 years being slowly eroded by statements like the above.

Also, you don't know anything about my health. You do happen to be the boss of me, but you are not the doctor of me. You have no idea what I eat, how much I exercise, what my blood pressure is, or whether or not I'm going to get diabetes. Not that any of that matters, because it is entirely none of your business."

Ira Glass
OK, I'm going to jump in one more time here, because this health question is actually kind of the third rail when people talk about fat people. Fat people are told all the time they're choosing to be unhealthy. Lindy and other fat people point out that actually, the causes of obesity are way more complex than just eating too much.

According to the National Institutes of Health, they include physiological, metabolic, genetic, psychological, social, and cultural factors. Also, we haven't invented a way to make fat people thin long term. Fewer than 1 in 100 obese people get thin and keep it off, according to one recent study, which tracked over a quarter million people for nine years.

So we're in this situation, where a third of all Americans are classified as overweight, another third of us are obese. Can it really be that so many of us are just weak and choosing to be unhealthy? There must be some other way to think about this. OK, back to Lindy.

Lindy West
I reject this entire framework. I'm not concerned with whether or not fat people can change their bodies through self-discipline and choices. Pretty much all of them have tried already. A couple of them have succeeded. Whatever.

My question is, what if they try and try and try and still fail? What if they're still fat? What if they're fat forever? What do you do with them then?

Do you really want millions of teenage girls to feel like they're trapped in bodies that are ruining their lives? And on top of that, it's because of their own moral failure? And on top of that, they're ruining America with the terribly expensive diabetes that they don't even have yet? You know what's shameful? A complete lack of empathy.

Ira Glass
A few days later, Dan Savage wrote a response, by the way, three times longer than Lindy's post. She didn't convince him at all. Dan and she went out once for beer and soft pretzels and talked it out a little to make sure they were still friends. Of course, they still didn't agree.

And then they never spoke about it again. Lindy says in the years since, though, she's noticed-- and Dan says this is true-- he writes about fat people differently. No cheap punchlines. Live and learn, he texted me. Of course, how Lindy writes about fat people was changed by this as well.

Sophie Tucker
"Almost every day, I hear some kind friend say, Sophie, dear, I think you're much too stout. Right away, they suggest the diet they think best. They make me sick. I wish they'd cut it out. I don't want to get thin. I don't want to get thin. Why should I when I'm all right as I am?"

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