Freedom: How Finding an Inclusive Community Helped Me Accept my Body

By Cameron Pettinato, Guest Contributor

To preface, I identify as a cisgender male using pronouns, he/him/his. In this blog, I will share my experience as a white gay male, which is arguably the identity with the most privilege within the LGBTQ+ community. I understand and acknowledge that many other members of the LGBTQ+ community, namely transgender women of color, experience amounts of discrimination and hardship that I have and never will meet. I will always fight and advocate for the rights, health, and longevity of these wonderful and vibrant individuals. 

In February of 2020, amid the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I came out to my family and friends as gay.

I had known for many years prior to this moment that I was gay, but building up the courage to reveal this to the closest people in my life was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. Gratefully, I have the most loving and supporting friends and family, and was accepted by the majority of people; especially those who matter to me.

Although the response I got was overwhelmingly positive, revealing my new identity to the world was unsurprisingly accompanied by an uncomfortable transitionary period, and with any transition comes hardships and adjustments. I learned quickly that the viewpoints surrounding body image and eating disorder culture are vastly different amongst different subgroups and subcultures within the LGBTQ+ community. In my experience, an overwhelming stigma against plus size bodies and perpetuation of negative body image exists within the particular cohort of gay men.

As a subgroup of a community that has struggled for decades to fight for equality and inclusion, it was really difficult for me to wrap my head around the lack of acceptance concerning body types that didn’t fit the unrealistic and unhealthy standard.

 I’ll never forget the slew of captions I read the first few times that I used Tinder: “Fat guys swipe left”, “Gym gays only”, “Looking for six-packs only”. In almost every conversation that I had with men on these apps, I would get asked why I didn’t include a shirtless photo of myself or a photo of myself from the gym. Bodies that fit the beauty standard were hypersexualized and bodies that didn’t were rejected; it was a cesspool of toxicity and an environment that could quickly magnify and create behaviors of disordered eating and distorted body image.

“Why don’t you have a shirtless photo on your profile? Are you fat?” These are real questions that I have had to endure, questions that seriously altered the previously positive trajectory of my self-perception.

Throughout my mid to late teen years, previous to coming out, I rarely found myself concerned about the way that my body looked or how it was perceived by others. I was a cross country and track runner, and during my later adolescence, I took a ton of time and energy to educate myself on how to eat a nutritious variety of foods. I knew that my body was healthy, and that was really all that mattered to me at the time.

When I came out, the way that I viewed my body was drastically altered. Now that I was seeking out a partner, I began to analyze every curve, every bump, and every stretch mark on my body that didn’t fit the unrealistic beauty standard that many gay men on social media and dating apps were openly seeking and attempting to normalize.

The pandemic, and subsequently exponential boom in social media usage only further exacerbated the way in which I dealt with this emerging negative perception of my body; it not only gave me the time to ruminate on my own body image, but it gave me the time to act on the unhealthy behaviors that I partook in as an attempt to change it. I was doing two intense workouts a day, in a far-too-large calorie deficit for my weight at the time, while eating little to no carbohydrates at all. I was at my lowest weight ever. The real kicker here is that I also felt the worst I had felt ever, mentally and physically. My body ached almost constantly, I was weak and riddled with chronic fatigue, and I rarely felt satiated or satisfied with the meals I was eating.

In August of 2020, I felt like my life was in peak turmoil. I was about to start at a new university after transferring from a different institution that I had a negative experience with, I was recovering from my recent COVID-19 infection, my anxiety and depression were at an all-time high, and for the first time ever, I wondered if coming out was the catalyst for this difficult state of being.

My life turned around so quickly. I made the courageous move to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and began my life at my new university. I fell in love with the vibrant and inclusive environment that the city and institution provided. Temple University, and the entire city of Philadelphia is such a gem; the city is full of amazing individuals from all backgrounds, ethnicities, races, genders, and sexualities.

Coming from a small town that consisted of a lot of people and opinions that had little diversity, these new people and places that entered my life opened up so many doors for me to explore the most authentic version of myself, and even more importantly, finally feel like that version of me had a sense of belonging.

Inclusion, that feeling of true belonging, can have such a sweeping positive affect on those who have experienced sustained oppression their entire lives. I began to learn a host of new skills from friends, mentors, professors, and employers in this new city: self-love, compassion, independence, courage, confidence, and so much more. I met my now boyfriend of almost a year and a half, who taught me to love myself more than anyone else ever has.

I garnered through all of this pain, and eventual resolution, the most important lesson of all: the moment that I started to love myself and began doing the best that I could do for myself in the present moment, everything started to change for the better around me.

I found authenticity within myself, I experienced health in its truest, most holistic form, and I started being mindful to what my body and mind needed. In the end, the way I feel now can only be described in one word: freedom. Freedom from the labels, freedom from the unrealistic social media standards, and freedom from any opinion about my body image that wasn’t my own.  

Born and raised in the suburbs of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Cameron Pettinato is a third-year student at Temple University studying public health and nutrition. He will soon be entering his graduate studies in dietetics with the goal of becoming a registered dietitian. Cameron has the mission of becoming a clinician of integrity; a clinician that prioritizes providing fair and equitable care to all and seeing the patient in a holistic sense. He enjoys cycling, cooking, hiking, travelling, playing the piano, and exploring the city of Philadelphia while he lives there. Learning to support others in their journey with food, health, and wellness is Cameron’s life passion.