Review: "Letting Go of Perfect" by Daniel O'Shaughnessy

Letting Go of Perfect by Daniel O'Shaughnessy
Published October 2025 via Jessica Kingsley Publishers
★★

O’Shaughnessy struggled with body image for years, especially within the context of the queer communities he was part of and where he sought approval. In Letting Go of Perfect, he details some of the lessons he's learned from lived experience and his work as a nutritionist.

I'll go ahead and qualify this review by saying that I'm not a gay man and I don't have personal experience with body dysmorphia, so I'm not the target audience for this book. I read it because I've read quite a bit about eating disorders and body image, and I'm always curious about different perspectives. O’Shaughnessy comes at it with a lot of compassion, acknowledging the internal and external factors that can contribute to body image issues and dysmorphia.

As much as I appreciated the intent here, though, I struggled with the book. The structure is a bit "everything but the kitchen sink", with a lot of lists that feel like something of a rapid-fire overview rather than in-depth experience or advice. Because of the lists, I ended up doing quite a lot of skimming, which is extremely unusual for me and books.

There's a lot of generalization here (particularly significant for gay men; especially when it intersects with body image within the gay community; for many gay individuals, especially those [...], life often becomes; in many fitness spaces, particularly in the gay community, there is often...), and I wasn't sure what to make of that—I think I would have liked to see more hard research worked in, because although I have no doubt that gay men face different body image considerations than other populations, it was never clear to me whether O’Shaughnessy's many particularlys and especiallys were meant only relative to straight men or something else. I'm not here to put body image struggles on a scale (no pun intended), but if you're going to tell me that something is particularly difficult for a certain group, I want to know who the comparison population is and what research this is based on.

A lot of the advice here is basically solid, if broad. Some of it gave me pause, though. I am still not sure why one of the first topics in the book is blood sugar balance, which to me felt like another set of food rules on top of whatever internal rules someone who might be struggling with food might already have, and before any other real discussion of those struggles took place. And while I can imagine some readers finding value in O’Shaughnessy's journal exercises and so on, some of the tasks felt appropriate only for those in a very specific place. "Try setting your strict dietary rules aside and eating whatever you want once a week" (not a direct quote), for example, would be manageable for some people, but for others it might lead to bingeing. I suspect (just a guess, mind) that the things O’Shaughnessy chose to put in here are the ones he found most useful in his own journey, which is of course fine, but it's worth remembering that everyone's path is different, and there are a lot more experiences and resources out there.

So where does this leave us? There's value in validation and seeing some of your own experience in a book, so I can imagine parts of this one being useful to folks with body dysmorphia or body image difficulties (two different things, but though the book officially focuses on the former I think the latter is more applicable for a lot of it) who feel more heard by resources aimed specifically at gay men or even more specifically at gay men who are part of a particular scene. But I'd approach it with caution and suggest using it only in conjunction with other resources, therapy, etc.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.