The Return of Diet Culture: Why Extreme Thinness Is Trending Again on TikTok
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At some point, everything comes back. In light of the retro-mania that currently seems to be everywhere, it is hardly surprising that the Twiggy aesthetic, ’90s heroin chic, the Y2K size-zero mania, and cotton balls soaked in orange juice as a dieting advice are also experiencing a comeback. But is Alice really returning to Hungerland?
Some sentences burn themselves so deeply into your memory that they accompany you for a lifetime. “Be glad you don’t know what real hunger feels like,” is one of them. While the echo of that sentence still rings crystal clear in my mind decades later, the context in which my now 99-year-old grandmother may have said those words has faded. Perhaps she was thinking of the catastrophic hunger winter of 1946/47, when temperatures dropped to minus 20 degrees, harvests failed, and the lingering consequences of war meant that food rations were barely enough to survive. Perhaps she was referring to the famines of the 1990s, for example, in North Korea and Sudan. And of course, it is always possible that she simply wanted to remind her granddaughter how privileged she was growing up—simply because she could eat more every day than she needed to maintain her weight, even with light physical activity. What my grandmother certainly was not thinking about was hunger as an aesthetic choice.
What Hunger Feels Like
And yet, in the long run, my grandmother would not be right about my ignorance. Like many other girls and young women, my teenage body learned to hunger. I trained it to ignore the pulling in my stomach, to breathe away the dizziness, and to compensate for the constant freezing by layering clothes. At some point, my stomach no longer had anything to say anyway. Mind over matter, right? The loud thoughts circle incessantly around calorie charts and control. The body, growing ever lighter, switches into energy-saving mode. Feelings become either numb or painfully sharp. A slow disappearance begins in full awareness—and this disappearance also extends to the things that actually make life worth living: friendships, joy, hobbies. In their place stands the mirror. It becomes a constant companion, but it long since shown a distorted image that cannot be trusted. Behind the mirror, the real body increasingly stands for absolute negation.
In any other era than ours, according to fashion historian Ann Hollander in Seeing Through the Clothes, this would be regarded “as an expression of illness, poverty, and nervous exhaustion.” After years of body positivity, such a fashion phenomenon—which disrupts biological perceptions of attractiveness—may provoke; culturally speaking, however, it is maximally retro. Black lips, real or painted dark circles under the eyes, hollow cheeks, narrow shoulders, pallor—all of these are recycled beauty codes, spread not only by heroin chic in the 1990s but also by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the mid-19th century. The latter were so obsessed with aestheticizing the image of the damned or sickly woman that their vision of femininity, passed down to this day, always carries a hint of tragedy, fragility, decay, and romantic suffering.
Are Women Supposed to Be Hungry?
In the real world, anorexia is creeping, quiet, and so consistent that hunger on a class trip to Berlin can land you in the hospital, at least temporarily. Far removed from any aestheticization, other girls and young women are familiar with such experiences. Some of them remain in clinics for much longer than a few hours—on average, 53.2 days. Over the past 20 years, the number of inpatient treatments among 10- to 17-year-olds has doubled.
A major reason for this drastic rise in cases is unrealistic beauty ideals propagated on social media. “Never has a photograph been a depiction of the world; yet through user-friendly post-production and ever-sharper image resolution, the gap between reality and its photographic reproduction is widening. As a result, the pressure grows to adapt the real body—with all its flaws revealed in close-up—to the digital or ideal one,” write Ole Nymoen and Wolfgang Schmitt about the influential body images of influencers. Under hashtags such as #SkinnyTok, extreme thinness is glorified. As a result, especially female-read bodies with prominent social media profiles are physically wasting away. Pro-ana content has also increased drastically again in recent years on Instagram, TikTok, and similar platforms. In the Skinny Girl Mindset, anorexia is not a serious psychological illness that can land you in a clinic for about two months—or even lead to death—but a lifestyle that reframes starvation as a self-care practice.
100 Years Later, the Same Delusion?
Hardly any weight-loss journey has illustrated this in recent years as clearly as that of Kim Kardashian. She boasted of having lost 16 pounds (8 kilograms) in less than a month in order to fit into a dress worn by Marilyn Monroe for her Met Gala appearance. In Vogue, Lisa Ludwig contextualized Kim’s radical cure by noting that she had done “exactly what is expected, especially of women and female-read persons in our society: successfully fought against her own body.” The editor does not turn this into a heroine’s tale. On the contrary, diets and thinness mania have accompanied women constantly since the time they fought for the right to vote.
As early as the 1920s, the ideal flapper body was thin, androgynous, and boyish. Judith Mackrell writes in Flappers: “Diet trends and slimming pills flooded the market, promising everyone a narrow hip and a flat chest. Before the war, few respectable women smoked, but the numbers rose sharply when cigarettes were newly marketed as a means of losing weight.”
About 30 years later, when the British model Lesley Lawson was introduced in Vogue in 1965 under her nickname, fashion editors wrote: “Twiggy is called Twiggy because she looks as if a strong storm could break her in two and throw her to the ground … Twiggy is so slightly built that other models stare at her. Her legs look as though she did not get enough milk as a baby, and her face has that expression one presumably saw on Londoners during the German air raids.”
Another 30 years later, Kate Moss became the icon of heroin chic—a trend that supposedly aimed to appear real, unfiltered, and anti-glamorous, presenting fragile bodies as a counter-image to the fitness, wealth, achievement, and optimism of the 1980s. Poverty, exhaustion, and withdrawal no longer appeared on the glossy pages of Vogue, Elle, and others as alarming conditions, but as a mood laden with meaning. In this context, Kate Moss’s later famous sentence, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” can also be understood as the distilled logic of an overprivileged era in which hunger is an aesthetic choice and nothing life-threatening.
Echo of Everything That Came Before
Perhaps what unsettles countless commentators about the return of diet culture is not the recurrence itself, but how eerily familiar low-calorie meal plans and excessive exercise routines feel. Of course, none of this is a historical catastrophe—especially not in view of the 295 million people worldwide who in 2024 suffer from acute, life-threatening food insecurity. But weren’t we further along? Mindfulness instead of compulsive optimization?
After all, even Kate Moss publicly apologized in 2018 for her now-infamous remark, which had become a dieting mantra for an entire generation seeking to lose weight. Women’s magazines no longer reported incessantly on ever more bizarre-sounding slimming tricks used by celebrities. Body positivity at least briefly promised a shift in supposed standards that turn hunger into proof of performance, aestheticize illness, and revive old narratives of control.
For Naomi Wolf, this kind of hunger was already in the 1990s part of an ideologized beauty standard that functions as the last effective disciplinary instance for women or female-read persons. When traditional role prescriptions—motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity—lose their persuasive power, the body moves into focus and becomes a battlefield.
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More about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood:
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