“This is my body. It is MINE.”
Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman“This is my body. It is MINE.” is the defining declaration of Lindy West’s turn from private shame toward public self-determination. In “Hello, I Am Fat,” the phrase stakes a claim not only to her body, but to the authority to describe its value without asking permission from people who regard fatness as a defect to be corrected.
Emergence of the Declaration
The change began with an image that West had not expected to find. Leonard Nimoy’s Full Body Project showed fat, naked women laughing, embracing, and looking directly at the camera; they appeared as people and as objects of beauty, rather than as targets of ridicule. West first clicked away, then returned to the photographs. Their unapologetic visibility unsettled her, but also loosened the conviction that her own body had to remain hidden.
The photographs offered a contrast to the lessons she had absorbed through dieting and public contempt. After a nutrition class reduced the prospect of eating apples without nausea to the need for more restriction, West began to cry and laugh at once. Nimoy’s images suggested a different possibility: that her body could be seen without being treated as a punch line, and that she might decide it was valuable rather than leave that judgment to strangers who hated her. She declined to sign up for another session of the class.
From Private Shame to Public Claim
In the post “Hello, I Am Fat,” the declaration became a public act. West accompanied the post with a full-body photograph taken that day by staff photographer Kelly O and a caption giving her age, height, and weight: 28 years old, 5 feet 9 inches, and 263 pounds. Until then, she had used the word fat only in a private email exchange with Dan Savage and in conversations with trusted friends, and even there she had spoken it with shame rather than power. Publishing the photograph and the caption made that previously private identification visible and deliberate.
The post sets the bodily declaration against a familiar promise: that life would begin only after West became smaller. She describes having wanted a different body for most of her life and having imagined that weight loss would bring the clothes, work, and love she wanted. When her body did not change, the promise offered no release; she rejected the idea that she had to keep treating herself as a failed future version of a thinner woman.
The emphatic “MINE” turns the post’s bodily self-description into a boundary. West writes that she loves her body and does not have to justify its attractiveness, usefulness, or health to anyone else. Her point is not that other people’s reactions disappear, but that those reactions do not give them ownership of her body or the right to decide whether her life has begun.
Refusal of the Shame Framework
The declaration also answers arguments that present hostility toward fat people as concern for health. In the years before the post, Dan Savage had publicly defended the position that a person could not be both obese and healthy. West places that stance within a wider culture that invoked healthcare costs, airplane armrests, children, and health to make contempt appear benevolent. For her, concern offered no excuse for treating fat people as acceptable targets or for demanding that they prove their worth through weight loss.
West’s post rejects the premise that thinness is the goal and fatness an unfinished state. It also refuses the idea that each fat person must explain the cause of their body or defend it against outside judgment. The question of whether a particular body satisfies someone else’s test of health does not determine who owns it. The declaration thus shifts the terms of the discussion: away from whether West has justified her body, and toward why other people assume they are entitled to demand that justification.
The post makes the method of shame itself part of the argument. West contends that shaming a population already subjected to shame does not help it, and that diets and humiliation are not reliable instruments of change. She notes, ironically, that after rejecting the framework and falling in love with her body, she began losing weight immediately. The detail does not restore weight loss as the point or prove that self-acceptance should produce a particular physical outcome; instead, it exposes the contradiction in treating shame as a necessary path to change.
Significance and Limits
The phrase’s force lies in what it claims and what it refuses. West does not present her body as a problem whose worth depends on being healthy, attractive, useful, or smaller. Nor does she suggest that declaring ownership makes the stigma she describes vanish. Elsewhere in this account she acknowledges both the pain of being mocked or ignored and her pride in her body’s strength. The declaration holds those experiences together without making suffering the price of self-knowledge.
In the post, bodily ownership becomes a form of public speech: West names herself, shows her body, and refuses the demand to apologize for it. Its emphasis on “MINE” draws a clear boundary around judgment and authority. Rather than waiting for strangers to grant her value, she asserts that her life and body already belong to her.
