Engl. transl.: The essence of Pro-Anorexia communities: Content analysis of blogs

Pro-anorexia community ("Pro-Ana") is created online among participants who need encouragement and support in the diet and weight loss processes. The participants are teenage girls who suffer from a negative body image, who Feel lonely and socially alienated from their situation and from their perception of the ideal of beauty. In pro-Anna communities anorexia is elevated to a miracle: pictures, songs and letters addressed to "Anna", deal with the glorification of thinness and on the way to adhering to the desired goal of weight loss. These communities form an affiliation group for girls looking for information on diet, weight reduction and sharing space in the emotional realm and in the social realm, without judging their thoughts and desires. The present study was conducted in aim to improving the familiarity with the issues that concern girls who designate themselves for an anorexic lifestyle and who run a blog on the subject. Its purpose was to map out the main issues immigrants in the blogs of girls in the pro-Anna community and discover their prevalence. The sample included 30 blogs, of these, five posts from each blog were sampled (N = 150). From the analysis of the texts, 11 themes emerged: relationships with family, diet menus, sports, reference to "Anna", fasting, membership in the pro-Anna community, friends in physical reality, body descriptions, methods to speed up the process of weight loss and environmental deception, mood and photos inspiration. The most common of these themes were those who were engaged in diet, mood, membership in the Pro-Ana community, relationships with friends in physical reality and body descriptions. This study provides an introduction to the content world of a community Pro-Anna

The present study found that sharing moods and the shaky emotional world occupied bloggers in 70% of the posts, in 90% of the blogs (Boniel-Nissim & Dolev-Cohen, 2014). The direct reference to "Anna" was relatively low compared to the other issues found 27% of blogs. The pro-Anna community functions as a social community and fills the need in the social affiliation of the young women who are members of it.