Wellness Culture Wants Us To Be Perfect. Queer People Know It's Not That Simple

For many queer people, years of feeling judged, rejected or pressured to fit in can shape how we relate to our bodies.

Mainstream wellness loves a set of instructions. Eat clean, train harder, get eight hours’ sleep, meditate more, buy (and try not to forget to take) that £70 “miracle” supplement, and perhaps sign up for a Hyrox competition while you’re at it.

But if you have a takeaway, spend a weekend partying or skip hot yoga for a hookup, you’ve somehow let yourself down. Apparently, looking after your health is now like having a second job, where you feel guilty if you’re not in an ice bath at 4am, doing everything the protocol-led biohackers tell you to do.

As a gay man who spent many years treading water in unconscious shame, I studied a two-dimensional nutrition curriculum that taught me what food could do for the body but also reinforced my belief that health was something I could perfect. I followed diets, tracked my progress and treated discipline as evidence that I was doing well. Whenever I veered off plan, the ripples of not feeling good enough would follow.

Meanwhile, I kept the behaviours that didn’t fit the healthy image I was trying to project firmly beneath the surface. What I failed to recognise was how much of my relationship with food and my body was being shaped by shame, pressures within the queer community, my then-undiagnosed ADHD, and the ways I had learnt to cope with stress and the trauma I carried.

After fifteen years in practice and more than my own share of healing, I’m more interested in what a routine means to someone than whether they follow it perfectly. Is food nourishment,........

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