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A “Typical Anorexic” returned?
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“Do you want a treat? What the hell, are you a dog? ” - says one of the tiktoks on the request of #skinnytok . Ever since this hashtag was encouraged in March, hundreds of thousands of views have been gaining a video with it. In them, girls are divided by losing weight tips. If it seems to you that it sounds terribly familiar, then you do not think.
Designer
Designer
Vitya ErshovPublication
July 21, 2025
In the video under the hashtag #SKINNYTOK , blogger shall share their “toxic motivation” - as they themselves call statements aimed at “self -discipline” and “work on the body of a dream”. Sometimes these are quite harmless phrases: "Start working on your dream today, and do not put off for tomorrow." But there are more radical ones: “I envy you? I am thin and tall ”or“ While you come up with another outfit, I'm just thin. ”
In June, the skinnitok team drew attention to the hashtag (which, however, did not particularly interfere with bloggers promoting weight loss). Now, when trying to introduce #SKINNYTOK or other phrases related to losing weight, for example, Girl Dinner, the user will be offered to go to the page with information about food disorders.
For those who found the Internet of the early 2010s, #SKINNYTOK and its blocking look more like a flashback than a new trend. Then in VKontakte a real subculture originated : tens of thousands of people (most often teenage girls) have lost a losing weight on the covenants of the public anorexica (abbreviated as “TA”) and “40 kg”.
The social network was filled with pictures with “effective” diets for 300 calories per day and extreme weight loss tips. One of the most popular and alarming practices in such communities was an “evaluation” when girls shared their photos in underwear (the face, most often, was cut) and ask commentators to evaluate their body, and also advise how many kilograms should be reset.
Often, minor girls laid out such posts, and they left their comments (and continue now) adults: they made “compliments” or advised how many kilograms to lose to like the guys. At the same time, community administrators have never modified this content. The VKontakte service itself has repeatedly tried to block the Typical Anorexic group (for the first time back in 2013), but instead of one community for more than half a million subscribers, dozens of new pages with tens of thousands of participants simply appeared.
Already in the second half of the 2010s, simultaneously with the trend that appeared on a body positive, the cult “TA” and its painful consequences for the whole generation briefly faded into the background (although the public itself continued to function). But after a decade, we seem to be returning to the origins of beauty standards, only now beauty industry has come up with dozens of new ways to sell “aesthetics of thinness” to people.
The popularity of the Google request "Ozempic" has grown 20 times over the past four years. The Russian market is also not far behind: TV presenter Victoria Bonya in her Instagram account advertises the clinic where, as she claims, you can choose “pens” (the so-called apparatus for the introduction of drugs like Ozza) for any request.
And for those who cannot afford expensive injections (each syringe costs about 20 thousand rubles), the “skinnitics” developed. “We can no longer say S-Slovo (Skinny), so write in the comments what to use instead,” says Blogger Liv Schmidt in one of his videos on YouTube. Her Tiktok account, which totaled more than 700 thousand subscribers, the service blocked due to propaganda of extreme weight loss.
Liv is called one of the main SkinnyTOK influens. Her videos were encouraged in the fall of 2024 thanks to her straight and hard manner. At the same time, in an interview with WSJ, Liv herself admitted that her desire to be thin was affected by public pressure. After blocking Tiktok, the girl created a closed losing weight community , a subscription for which costs at least $ 10.
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It may seem that compared to the cult of a “typical anorexic” now, everything is not so bad: instead of the recommendation of a “drinking diet”, the emphasis in the content of a blogger like Schmidt is often shifted to “health” and “reducing the level of cortisol” (because, according to bloggers, you gain weight, which, in fact, is very exaggerated ). But ultimately, subscribers are still convinced to endlessly limit the diet and accept “magical” additives that bloggers themselves advertise.
According to the Sprout Social marketing agency on February 2024, half of the consumers regularly make purchases after viewing the influenser content, and 30 % say that they began to trust They are more than six months ago.
And now, like ten years ago, studies are published in which constant immersion in fitness content is associated with an increased level of anxiety and a decrease in self-esteem. However, in fact, this cult of losing weight is not at all a rollback after the “Bodyposive era”.
According to analysts , the mass interest of the media in the body positive was very selective. Often, the campaigns aimed at the “adoption of the body”, although they moved away from the strict standards of the model body, still ultimately promoted the image of a “smooth” and toned body, which is successfully “for sale”.
Of course, thanks to the appearance of the discourse about body positive, in the media, in principle, we talked more about body cheese and fatter, and we finally could look at the legacy of the “typical anorexic” and horrify. But the practices of control have not disappeared anywhere - on the contrary, they became only more inventive and steady.