Speaking on Queer Health, Body Image, and Healing

I speak about the gap between how health is marketed and how it is actually lived, particularly within LGBTQ+ communities and high-pressure cultures.

Much of modern wellness is built around optimisation, discipline, and aesthetics. But for many queer people, health is shaped far more by shame, chronic stress, trauma, and the pressure to belong. My work explores how these forces influence the way people eat, move, relate to their bodies, and seek control through health behaviours.

Drawing on clinical practice, lived experience, and evidence-informed frameworks, I challenge the idea that wellbeing can be reduced to food rules, fitness targets, or willpower. I focus instead on how identity, nervous system regulation, and cultural context shape health outcomes, and why nutrition and mental health cannot be separated from the lives people are actually living.

I am best known for bringing the complexity of queer health into public view. This includes body dysmorphia in gay men, the psychological cost of gym culture and steroid use, disordered eating as an adaptation to trauma and chronic stress, and why LGBTQ+ health requires approaches that go beyond generic advice. My work draws heavily from the themes explored in The Queer Guide to Nutrition and Lifestyle and Letting Go of Perfect, where nutrition is framed not as control, but as support for a body that has learned to survive.

My perspective is also shaped by postgraduate study in psychedelics and transdisciplinary practice, with a focus on how altered states illuminate the relationship between trauma, meaning, identity, and mental health. Rather than positioning psychedelics as solutions, I explore the lessons they offer about control, authenticity, forgiveness, and the limits of purely cognitive approaches to healing, and how these insights can be translated into everyday mental health and wellbeing without the medicine itself.

My talks combine clinical insight with a vulnerable personal narrative. I speak honestly about what real change requires when the nervous system is dysregulated and the body does not feel safe. Rather than offering fixes, I help audiences understand patterns, context, and why certain behaviours make sense, even when they are causing harm.

Where appropriate, I can also integrate brief somatic or breath-based practices to support grounding and reflection. These are always optional, trauma-aware, and used to complement the conversation rather than dominate it.