(Interview 13, Veronika, 23 y.o.)

As shown above and in the theoretical framework, during adulthood, individuals adopt the familiar practices of their surroundings. Practices of food consumption were formed by both parents, brothers, sisters, as well as a circle of friends and peers (Bozheva, 2019). However, the circle of peers has a different side, for example, dictating to girls what a conventional or “normal” body should look like. In childhood and adolescence, individuals had a negative experience of developing food habits, often associated with the assessment of the appearance of girls by their peers as “fat”. Many female bloggers shared their experience when bullying in the school environment mainly contributed to the development of complexes and even depressive episodes, which later forced them to restructure the nutrition process and pay much more attention to it than before:

because there [at school] are the most violent people in a whole, well, really there are children who just repeat over and over again the same thing every day, that you just start to dwell on, that you develop a complex... I had a classmate, and he often told me that I'm fat “потому что там [в школе] находятся самые жестокие люди вообще, которые ну реально бывают такие дети, которые просто тебе каждый день долбят одно и то же, что ты просто начинаешь так загоняться, что ну у тебя развивается комплекс… у меня был одноклассник, и он часто говорил мне, что я толстая, что я жирная” (Интервью 9, Алина, 21 год)

(Interview 9, Alina, 21 y.o.)

Another information channel for bloggers was the media and mass culture, which formed not only an interest in the assimilation of “trendy” lifestyle (meaning healthy lifestyle), but also dictated the generally accepted “ideals” of beauty, which in turn require a rethink of their nutrition in order to achieve the “body canon”. Social networks encourage some people to learn the “basics” of healthy eating and turn this practice into a lifestyle:

when you surf the Instagram, you read not only ordinary bloggers, travel, beauty, but also those who actively promote healthy nutrition, veganism, vegetarianism, raw food, and still you slowly start to think that it is cool, people eat this way, it is healthy and delicious “когда ты сидишь в Инстаграме, ты читаешь не только блогеров обычных, там тревел, бьюти, но и которые активно продвигают полезное питание, там веганство, вегетарианство, сыроедение, и всё равно ты потихонечку задумываешься о том, что это круто, люди так питаются, это полезно и вкусно” (Интервью 3, Яна, 31 год)

(Interview 3, Yana, 31 y.o.)

In another case, media space, including Instagram, distributes unified visual images that represent women's beauty, which can significantly influence young women who are actively included in the Instagram community - “I remember that I liked myself, I had such thin legs, and everything is like from public pages on Instagram” “я помню, что я себе понравилась, у меня были такие худые ножки, и все как из пабликов в Инстаграме” (Интервью 10, Татьяна, 29 лет) (Interview 10, Tatiana, 29 y.o.).

Due to the fore-mentioned factors, such as: rethinking nutrition practices under the influence of the immediate surroundings, peer pressure, as well as trends in the media space, informants came to study and practice various types of food manipulation. The topic of dieting has become one of the key narratives of female healthy lifestyle bloggers concerning the initial stages of changing their eating behavior. Diet, as a phenomenon in the individual trajectories of females, had different “missions”: some used it as a sporting measure at a time when they were professionally engaged in sports, others - as a mean of fighting complexes, where the ability to find the willpower to follow a diet served as a kind of compensation for the imposed unattractiveness. Frequently, in these cases, dieting, according to informants, has transformed into a “hobby” that reaches bigotry. Diet, as a way to control overeating, is another prerequisite for turning to such practices. However, this method of control does not always warrant itself, it simply becomes insufficient, and is accompanied by “gluttony” and “cavings”, which are part of eating disorders. Part of the blogs are based on the experience of coping with an eating disorder, often including a negative experience of dieting, which implies control and the related concept of “limited consumption”, associated with coping with overeating; where it is often noted by informants that dieting represents a “hard cap” that works in the opposite direction and can only worsen the situation:

Diet equals restriction. When a person has restrictions, no matter how it turns out, he/she still wants to remove this restriction from himself/herself, the forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest “диета равно ограничение. Когда у человека есть ограничения, как ни крути он всё равно захочет это ограничение с себя снять, запретный плод сладок” (Интервью 9, Алина, 21 год)

(Interview 9, Alina, 21 y.o.)

The vast majority of diets are accompanied by cavings, which are thought to be violations of the regulations of proper nutrition or, in some cases, diets, and are widely discussed on blogs (Litvina & Ostroukhova, 2015). So, informants often associate their experience of dieting with such negative mental consequences:

You tighten the diet, tighten the training regime, it again does not bring result... and you blow a fuse, and you really gobble; wake up, and you have an empty pot of borsch, candy wrappers, you have this pot-belly “ты ужесточаешь диету, ужесточаешь режим тренировок, это снова не приносит результат… и тебе срывает крышу, и ты реально жрёшь, очнулся, а у тебя там пустая кастрюля из-под борща, обёртки от конфет, у тебя вот такое брюхо” (Интервью 1, Елена, 27 лет)

(Interview 1, Elena, 27 y.o.)

Thus, most of the interviewed female bloggers by the time they started their Instagram career, had gone through various diets and had a new, more experienced and straight rethink of their views on nutrition and lifestyle in general, which gave them knowledge and competence, that they began to broadcast to the public. It is worth noting that a certain expert position on nutrition and health issues was formed among informants also through temporary or permanent immersion in veganism or vegetarianism - topics that some healthy lifestyle bloggers consistently cover in their Instagram accounts.

A slightly different focus on eating habits was formed directly due to the presence of sports in the lives of informants. Some of them shared memories of being restricted all the time and scolded for deconditioning - “once, the coach said I was very fat. And then began one of the worst moments of my life” “в какой-то момент тренер сказал, что я очень толстая. И тогда начался один из самых худших моментов моей жизни” (Интервью 2, Ирина, 21 год) (Interview 2, Irina, 21 y.o.). In this case, the presence of the informant in spheres that are relatively “unfree” in terms of appearance and body images, for example, if the informant was engaged in competitive ballroom dancing or gymnastics, influenced their desire to rethink and change the nutrition process, so much “hitted” their mental or physical state earlier. Others have distinguished sport as a mean of changing nutrition - “I began to eat the right food in order to have a result from sports” “Я стала есть правильную пищу для того, чтобы был результат от спорта” (Интервью 6, Дарья, 28 лет) (Interview 6, Daria, 28 y.o.) - here you can see the opposite effect, when the motivation to rebuild nutrition practices is not caused by some negative background.

Sport as a habit and a tool for self-control

The construction of the nutrition process and sports behavior are inextricably linked among healthy lifestyle bloggers. Moreover, a number of blogs contain content that significantly covers the topics of sports and coaching, so it is important to pay attention to those "practices from the past" that have formed the current usual sports lifestyle.

Regular sports and even career choices in a related field can be the result of a habit inculcated by parental experience. The family environment instills ideas about the “norm” of bodily practices, including sports behavior associated with them. For example, the parents of the informants may have been regular visitors to the gym, fans of home training, or previously engaged in sports professionally, that in one way or another affected the views and attitudes of their children:

In childhood, my dad and I started doing push-ups every day, and when I was 15, I did 25 push-ups freely, touching the floor with my chest. By the way, I remember that my mother at one time was engaged in sports and she had such an abs... “в детстве я с папой начала отжиматься каждый день, и лет в 15 я свободно отжималась раз 25, касаясь грудью пола. Впрочем, я помню, что и мама у меня одно время занималась спортом и у нее был такой пресс…” (Интервью 6, Дарья, 28 лет)

(Interview 6, Daria, 28 y.o.)

Sports became a part of the daily life of female bloggers, which could also be facilitated by the immediate surroundings, in the case of classes in sports sections from childhood, and these classes could be both amateur and professional:

it seems to me that this is from childhood, you are disposed to it, you like it. I was always drawn, I just saw an ad there, then they recruited for hand-to-hand fighting, I just poked that I want to go there “мне кажется, что это с детства, ты к ему-то расположен, тебе это нравится. Меня тянуло всегда, просто я там увидела объявление, тогда набирали на рукопашный бой, я просто тыкнула, что я туда хочу” (Интервью 5, Елена, 23 года)

(Interview 5, Elena, 23 y.o.)

The interviewed group also mentioned the appearance of sports in life both for medical reasons and as a new hobby or mean of self-control over the body and mind in later life: “I was very interested in it, especially when you see the result and hear the enthusiastic reviews of people… when a person is engaged in sports, they improve their thinking processes and concentration” “меня это очень увлекло, особенно когда ты видишь результат и слышишь восторженные отзывы людей… И вообще, когда человек занимается спортом, у него улучаются мыслительные процессы и концентрация” (Интервью 6, Дарья, 28 лет) (Interview 6, Daria, 28 y.o.).

Thus, the tremendous experience, that informants have, gives them the result and the position that they hold on a permanent basis at the moment. However, in most cases, only experiments in sports and food practices became a vehicle for the transformation of female body capital and attitude to the external and internal state of the body and its critical importance in the life of informants, which led them to become an “expert” in this field in the media space.

3.2 Professional strategies and trajectories

Professional background

Women who are currently healthy lifestyle bloggers on Instagram have diverse and unique personal and professional trajectories, which cannot be left out of this study and is an important aspect for understanding how bloggers construct individual career choices. Majority of the informants in this collection of interviews in narratives concerning their educational paths, note that they have drifted away from their initial education, in most cases, it was higher education, which somehow implies intellectual labour (for example, an economist or a programmer), and carried out further training through courses on teaching various sports disciplines. Thus, we can trace the tendency to convert leisure practices, hobbies in the field of sports into a specific activity, namely coaching, which later became a professional and became a full-fledged source of income. It is also important to note that a significant part of the interviewed females was engaged in a particular sport professionally in the past, but only a few ones chose the path of higher education related to physical culture, and through it came to coaching, while other informants “tried themselves” for a while, but later returned to vocational aptitude.

Prevalently, young female bloggers with sports content articulate their education in another field as an important stage and experience in their life, without which they would not be able to “find themselves”, especially since the lack of higher education in the field of health and studying practices of working with body capital is not a barrier to further work in the field of fitness and healthy lifestyle blogging. However, according to informants with special sports education, the lack of such a long-term theoretical and practical “enrichment” reduces the competence of such bloggers and the level of trust in the content they share: “well, as if I just judge by myself, all these sofa experts should die out and should become ... the content should become high-quality” “ну как будто я просто по себе сужу, что мол все вот эти диванные эксперты должны вымереть и должно стать… контент должен стать качественным” (Интервью 10, Татьяна, 29 лет) (Interview 10, Tatiana, 29 y.o.). Thus, informants demonstrate a sufficiently polarized opinion about the need to have so-called “educational” capital, including in the form of a diploma, so that afterward their expert opinion on the social network becomes one of those that hundreds or thousands of people listen to.

No less important characteristics of subsequent strategies for successful blog development are just “co-skills”, most frequently associated with creative potential. Some informants are initially associated with creative professions, which significantly increases their competitiveness in the media space due to the skills and abilities to produce or accompany content related to “entertainment”, which has considerable weight in the post-information economy: “As for design and Instagram, there was a period when I was engaged in promotion there, and the design skills were very useful there” “Что касается дизайна и Инстаграма, был период, когда я продвижением там занималась, и там навыки дизайна очень пригодились” (Интервью 3, Яна, 31 год) (Interview 3, Yana, 31 y.o.).

Thus, we can conclude that there are no formal educational requirements for healthy lifestyle bloggers to succeed in an online professional environment, however, some bloggers are superior to others in terms of the pace of development and subjective quality of content and its promotion, since they have a number of competencies previously obtained within the educational field, one way or another related to the “production of emotions”.

Career reconciliation

As we have already seen, many female healthy lifestyle bloggers received further training in order to become more competent specialists, and to use this formal “capital” to advance in their career ladder. After analyzing the narratives of informants, we can conclude not only that they had multi-level educational paths, but also similar professional “movements”: “I was doing all sorts of digital stuff, I was an SMM-manager, I was a website editor, I was an assistant to an entrepreneur… And then yoga started professionally” “я занималась всякими диджитал штуками, я была SMM менеджером, была редактором сайта, была помощницей одного там предпринимателя… А потом йога началась профессионально” (Интервью 8, Ася, 30 лет) (Interview 8, Asya, 30 y.o.).

Such changes in the biographies of bloggers are ultimately characterized by changes in the labor market and increased competition, as well as the digitalization of society and, consequently, the development of technologies and resources for earning online. In accordance with the above trends, informants claimed that career reconciliation was quite logical and comfortable for them to earn money and develop as a professional, as well as the transition to freelancing: “I'm a freelancer, but I already have a regular customer, an employer, so to speak, and I just work remotely. And so I can combine” “Я фриланс, но у меня уже есть как бы постоянный заказчик, работодатель так сказать, и я удалённо просто работаю. И поэтому я могу совмещать” (Интервью 3, Яна, 31 год) (Interview 3, Yana, 31 y.o.). Career reconciliation is the main professional strategy of healthy lifestyle bloggers, of which the Instagram “online career” is always a part. Thus, we can distinguish several types of professional trajectories of young women-healthy lifestyle bloggers. The following types of trajectories were identified: “blogging as an addition to coaching”, “blogging as an addition to the main creative profession”, “combining in multi-tasking mode”.

Almost half of informants define coaching as their vocational aptitude and main profession, however, they put blogging in Instagram in a related position, since activity in the blog is closely connected with their offline work, promoting their personal brand in the media space: “My main activity is blogging... in addition to coaching in the gym, I also sell online courses with leg split, I sell it on the Internet via Instagram” “Основная моя деятельность, это и есть ведение блога… у меня помимо тренерства в зале, я еще продаю онлайн курс со шпагатом, продаю его в интернете через Инстаграм” (Интервью 7, Дарья, 25 лет) (Interview 7, Daria, 25 y.o.). Another highlighted type of professional path is to combine blogging with a profession related to the inclusion of the creative capital of the informant: “now I have such a reboot, and therefore more like with graphic design now... there was a period when I was actively engaged in Instagram with it” “сейчас у меня такая перезагрузка, и поэтому больше как-то с графическим дизайном сейчас… был период, когда я активно там Инстаргамом занималась” (Интервью 3, Яна, 31 год) (Interview 3, Yana, 31 y.o.). In this case, such “capital” becomes talent (creativity), which allows an individual to acquire a number of creative competencies during offline activities and convert them for subsequent use in a public Instagram blog, which, according to bloggers with similar skills and talents, is the uniqueness of their accounts. Informants who adhere to “combining in multi-tasking mode” build a career with a clear structure, where the “elements” that fit closely into it often complement each other:

Well, online remote trainings, sometimes I give advice about... give advice to the coaches, because I have a lot of experience and sometimes they want to know how people have so long held in training, well, that's consulting, it turns out, the third point is the income from the shootings... the fourth is, well, it's a blog, from which I also earn - barter things or money for advertising, fifth, sometimes freelancing, I make sites to them [the other coaches] “Так, ну в общем онлайн-дистанционки, иногда я даю консультации по поводу… даю консультации тренерам, потому что у меня большой опыт, и иногда они хотят узнать, как люди у меня так долго удерживается на тренировках, ну это вот консультирование, получается, третий момент - это доход со съемок, то есть если это какая-то коммерческая съемка, то мне, конечно, платят за мое время, четвертый - это, ну это блог, с которого я тоже зарабатываю, либо бартером какие-то вещи, либо деньгами за рекламу, так, пятый, получается, ну иногда на фрилансе я сайты им [другим тренерам] делаю” (Интервью 13, Вероника, 23 года)

(Interview 13, Veronika, 23 y.o.)

It should be noted that these females do not define a blog as one of the main channels of earnings, but prefer the strategy of “playing safe” to protect themselves in an unstable labor market, and in the case of “blog burn-out”, they will be able to realize themselves, for example, taking the position of specialists in online earnings, who are behind the screen of publicity, such as SMM, PR - professionals, product managers, and others. This strategy has become more and more popular in recent years with the increase in cash flow and the popularization of earnings on the Internet, which contributes to the “segregation” of Instagram blogging as a new full-fledged market space with an open and promising labor market.

An interesting conclusion here is that despite all the attractiveness and innovation of Instagram blogging as a new market “arena”, female bloggers start some ways of retreat in case of failure or personal burnout in a professional online environment: they combine 2 or more types of work and even combining online-work and study. It is worth noting that the only exception in choosing a career strategy was the informant, who refused the reconciliation and completely focused on a career in the blogosphere, selling advertising and her online course with a competent construction of individual food and sports practices.

The image of a «professional», the development of a personal brand

One of the most important strategies for promotion in the professional community is the construction of an image of a “professional” through the formation of a personal brand in the virtual space, in this case, broadcasted through an Instagram account. According to female bloggers, successful steps in building a personal brand directly contribute to the inflow of audience in the blog, and consequently to the inflow of physical clients and additional earnings: “as my portfolio, to sell myself, my service” “как мое портфолио, чтобы продать себя, услугу свою” (Интервью 5, Елена, 23 года) (Interview 5, Elena, 23 y.o.). Thus, we can conclude that professional activity in online is constantly connected with offline activity, namely, it has a direct impact on the success of self-realization of coaches when working directly with people.

Several behavioral models were identified in the context of constructing the image of a “professional”. The first conditional model - a demonstration of professional competence in the blog, where the professional capital of informants should come to the fore to convince users of the social network in the effectiveness of the demonstrated tips and practices, and where young women also realize their need to share their accumulated knowledge and experience with others:

I consider it my duty, I can't just balakat' [saying] what I believe, so I'm looking for a person who will help me with this [searching for reliable information], and I can with a clean conscience provide people with the information they are asking for “я считаю это своим долгом, я не могу просто балакать то, что я считаю, поэтому я ищу человека, который мне с этим [поиском достоверной информации] поможет, и я смогу с чистой совестью предоставить людям ту информацию, которую они просят” (Интервью 10, Татьяна, 29 лет)

(Interview 10, Tatiana, 29 y.o.)

A different model of self-branding focuses on showing your own body project to the public. The main task of bloggers here is to inspire and motivate users to turn to them as coaches and achieve results that are reflected in the appearance of the professional himself/herself, which guarantees him/her the so-called image. To achieve this, informants write so-called “motivational posts”, in which they not only share their experience in writings, but also broadcast through photos the “ideal” bodies, demonstrating physical fit that are inscribed in the context of success. Thus, bloggers show the audience their stories of successful weight loss, confirming the effectiveness of the techniques used (Litvina & Ostroukhova, 2015). In this regard, there is the collective body assessment that allows bloggers to be declared, due to likes and various comments, as a certain «standard» or «professional». However, young women do not deny that it is important for them to receive attention and positive appraisals of work on their body project: “My body, I am a fan of beauty. When you work on your body, you want to brag of your results” “Мое тело, я фанат красоты. Когда ты работаешь над своим телом тебе хочется похвастаться своим результатом” (Интервью 6, Дарья, 28 лет) (Interview 6, Daria, 28 y.o.).

An interesting fact is that in addition to following one of the above models, where either educational or physical capital is more important, the studied group was united in the opinion that a personal brand is most successful and recognizable if it is formed through trust and “closeness” with the audience:

A personal brand should have some personal history behind it, and now everyone, even the coaches and these things that are happening, are reduced to the fact that they have to do this thing 50/50 - personal life to your professional activity, because then people are imbued with you “всё-таки за личным брендом должна стоять какая-то личностная история, и сейчас все даже тренеры и вот эти вещи, которые происходят, сводятся к тому, что должны вот эту штуку делать 50 на 50 - личная жизнь к твоей профессиональной деятельности, потому что тогда люди проникаются” (Интервью 13, Вероника, 23 года)

(Interview 13, Veronika, 23 y.o.)

Virtual trust is formed here by publishing private information, the boundaries of which are quite blurred and will be covered in the next section. In addition, quite an important aspect for self-realization as a professional is recognition in the professional community, which secures a certain professional reputation for the blogger due to media presence in a certain niche of the blogosphere. The appearance of the latter features requires time resources, social capital, and financial investments to increase the number of subscribers through advertising, targeting, and so on. Thus, it is worth noting that only a combination of models for constructing the image of a “professional” through the formation of a personal brand gives the most effective result, that is, a visual “beautiful picture” will not be enough without demonstrating competence through texts, video messages and coaching guides, and vice versa.

Networking

It is worth noting that networking is one of the most interesting and specific strategies for career advancement in the online space among the interviewed bloggers. In the case of healthy lifestyle bloggers, as in the blogosphere as a whole, the absolute fact is that the professional network is quite fragmented. This is shown in the fact that the virtual career “zone” itself does not depend on any physical structures, for example, departments or sectors as in physical organizations, that is, career choices for professional growth are not limited by directorship, time, or the physical environment (organization).

In most cases, described in interviews by informants, the social capital accumulated in the offline space becomes extremely important for career growth as a healthy lifestyle professional in the network, and that can be personal connections not only with representatives of the professional community, but also with clients (subscribers). Such contacts provide an opportunity to acquire the necessary competencies for further professionalization, as well as to expand the client base in the social network, where the audience will “flock” according to recommendations. A similar scheme of networking also works in an online environment, where informants use their blog and social networks to instantly attract the necessary resources or contacts:

I can rarely put out feelers on my Telegram channel or place a small ad in stories for a couple of hours, but this is usually enough to catch applications, and from there some special person in my opinion stood out, whom I could hire “могу редко кинуть там какую-то удочку себе на Телеграм канал или небольшое объявление разместить в сторис на пару часов, но обычно этого хватает, чтобы словить заявок, и оттуда выделился какой-то особенный на мой взгляд человек, которого я могла бы взять на работу” (Интервью 10, Татьяна, 29 лет) (Interview 10, Tatiana, 29 y.o.)

Thus, in these contexts, we can trace the strength of weak ties that take on a universal form between online and offline spaces.

Social capital accumulated before developing a career in the blogosphere is not the only channel for promoting yourself as a competitive specialist-blogger. Informants claimed that blogging can require constant engagement and activity, as well as professional skills and sometimes financial investments, which becomes a double advantage when “building a following” in Instagram, which can significantly contribute to rapid adaptation and recognition in their niche, which leads to the appearance of offers for collaboration: “I started to get acquainted through Instagram, well, virtually, for a long time I did not communicate with all instagrammers live” “я начала знакомиться через Инстаграм, ну виртуально, долгое время я со всеми инстаграмерами общалась не вживую” (Интервью 3, Яна, 31 год) (Interview 3, Yana, 31 y.o.). Collaboration with other bloggers is a conditionally final part of the networking process, which in some cases ends up joining a certain closed “blogger's community”, which is a channel for professional integration in the blogosphere:

All sorts of cool instagrammers gather there and go somewhere… I met most of the guys there who I still contact with. And after that, something started to happen, I was called by the guys on other instamits, some of them were close ones “Там собираются всякие инстаграмеры крутые и едут куда-то… Я там познакомилась с большей частью ребят, с которыми до сих пор общаюсь. И после этого как-то завертелось, меня начали звать ребята на другие инстамиты, там какие-то были закрытыми” (Интервью 3, Яна, 31 год)

(Interview 3, Yana, 31 y.o.)

Within the blogging on sports and nutrition, there is a different directivity and some freedom of choice of focus, but it does not relieve the professional community of such bloggers from the mutual competition, which only increases with digitalization and the increasing popularity of online earnings. However, an unexpected thing in the process of analyzing the data was the opposite logic of the studied group - instead of competing, bloggers support each other in the form of advertising “notes”, most often in a story format: “I put the layout of the person that he/she swaps to me, well, a short story or something like that and a video recommendation” “выкладываю макет человека, который он мне скидывает, ну коротенькую сторис там или что-то такое и видео-рекомендацию” (Интервью 11, Анна, 17 лет) (Interview 11, Anna, 17 y.o.). In other, more rare cases, when bloggers do not operate with advertising and money from it, they choose the tactic of abstracting from the competitive environment and only adhere to “narrow networking”, without going beyond their blogs. Informants admit that this tactic does not involve earning a lot of money in the online space, which is why it is most often chosen by bloggers who have selected the trajectory of “combining in multi-tasking mode”.

3.3 Blogging as an integral part of life and the issue of maintaining work-life balance among bloggers

Career growth in the blogosphere

The blogosphere as a career platform was chosen by informants for the vast majority of reasons. We have already found out which factors from personal experience before the “start” as a blogger are the most significant and relevant for the studied group, but it is also worth mentioning what primary motivations for starting a career trajectory were identified among healthy lifestyle bloggers.

Among the initial goals and prerequisites for starting an Instagram blog, three main labels were assigned: self-promoting as a specialist, affiliation, and through mentorship. In the first case, those informants entered the blogosphere who initially chose the professional trajectory “blogging as an addition to coaching”, where the main motivation was to expand the client base through an extensive Internet network: “And people come to me purely from the blog, so basically only in consequence of Instagram people come to me” “И люди приходят ко мне чисто из блога, поэтому в принципе только благодаря Инстаграм люди ко мне и приходят” (Интервью 7, Дарья, 25 лет) (Interview 7, Daria, 25 y.o.). The second prerequisite - a high need for attention and public recognition, which is realized through the translation of your own body project and its constant “upgrade”:

I started to just, stupidly post photos, because I claim very much attention, that is, because of the fact that I did not have parents, I need all the attention of society to be focused on me, and probably from this point of view, I started Instagram, posted photos, I was written there «oh, you are so beautiful, fine girl» (laughing), and I got some satisfaction from this “Начала вести просто, тупо выкладывать фотографии, потому что мне нужно очень сильно внимание, то есть из-за того что ну понятно у меня родителей не было, то мне нужно прямо всё внимание общества, чтобы было сконцентрировано на мне, и, наверное, с этой точки зрения завела Инстаграм, выкладывала фотки, мне писали там “ой, ты такая красивая, молодец” (смеется), и я с этого получала какое-то свое удовлетворение” (Интервью 13, Вероника, 23 года)

(Interview 13, Veronika, 23 y.o.)

Fulfilling this need for attention, the informants came to the realization of the fact that by their body project and knowledge gained through experience and education, they can earn money, by the way virtually and without having an employer. One of the most interesting, but rare guides to the “world of blogging” was mentorship - some informants managed to get acquainted through a friendly or professional environment with specialists in online earnings or with other bloggers who at that time had experience in building a career in the network and a certain degree of “skillfulness” in online earnings: “I met a girl blogger, she had 100,000 subscribers, and so she showed me this blogger's life ... advertising, barter, we went to Moscow with her, she introduced me to a bunch of bloggers” “я познакомилась с девочкой-блогером, у неё было 100 000 подписчиков, и вот она мне показала эту блогерскую жизнь… реклама, там бартер, мы с ней в Москву съездили, она меня познакомила с кучей ребят-блогеров” (Интервью 3, Яна, 31 год) (Interview 3, Yana, 31 y.o.). Hence, bloggers-mentors could persuade informants to start a blog, immerse them in the “community” and share the details of building a career in the blogosphere.

The study did not identify any universal path of career growth in the media space, informants noted only one common feature - a natural increase in the audience, which was most often explained by luck or the uniqueness of the content. In addition, they noted that “online success” does not depend on how long they have been in the blogosphere, but depends on how much they are involved, resource-invested and develop content. Thus, we were able to identify two key behavior models in the framework of building a career in the network, directly related to personal and professional realization in the blog.

The first model is conventionally named “blog as a source of income and self-realization”. This model is implemented by informants who were motivated to create an Instagram account in order to promote themselves as a specialist, as well as through mentorship. This behavioral model in the framework of building a career in Instagram puts in the foreground the opportunity to earn money in the arena of a developed social network, which regularly runs a lot of financial flows: “You have Instagram, viral radio works, and people go, advertising… Through Instagram, it is better to sell all sorts of courses online, sell online programs” “У тебя есть Инстаграм, сарафанное радио работает, и люди идут, реклама… Через Инстаграм лучше всего онлайн продавать всякие курсы, онлайн программы продавать” (Интервью 1, Елена, 27 лет) (Interview 1, Elena, 27 y.o.). In addition, apart from earning money from advertising in the blog self-realization in a professional role in an offline environment becomes important for bloggers-careerists. For example, a blog is used to promote the self in a sports “community” by using visibility on Instagram: “Mass-blogging and mass-liking… Grow your audience… Take a fitness-bikini - you are recognizable and you have a better chance of winning prizes. Good form is not enough, you need to be a public person” “Массблогинг и масслайкинг… Увеличить аудиторию. До определенного момента я думала, что много подписчиков - это классно. Взять фитнес бикини - ты узнаваема и у тебя больше шансов на призовые места. Хорошей формы мало, надо быть публичной личностью” (Интервью 1, Елена, 27 лет) (Interview 1, Elena, 27 y.o.).

The second model is conventionally named “blog as a personal diary for self-reflection”, because some informants who just had the affiliation as a motivation to start a blog, initially and to this day consider their own Instagram-blog as a way to cope with feelings, to throw out accumulated thoughts and emotions:

I sometimes publish personal information, it is more for the psychological safety valve of myself. When I want to share something, but I don't want to share it directly with my friends, so I want to bring it to the mass, I once made a post about why I don't have a boyfriend, probably a year ago or a little less. I was very worried about this, it was a great tragedy for me, everyone is getting married, and I don't have a boyfriend... “я публикую иногда личную информацию, это больше для психологической разрядки самой себя. Когда мне хочется чем-то поделиться, но не хочется делиться напрямую с друзьями, то хочется принести это в массу, я как-то выкладывала пост о том, почему у меня нет парня, наверное, год назад или чуть меньше. Я очень переживала по этому поводу, для меня это было большой трагедией, все выходят замуж, а у меня нет парня…” (Интервью 7, Дарья, 25 лет)

(Interview 7, Daria, 25 y.o.)

It is worth noting that some of the informants who adhere to this model do not deny the importance of career growth in the blog and promoting themselves as a specialist in order to increase income from online sales or attract physical clients, but they put the opportunity to get support and share experience on an equal level, and sometimes even higher, with this aspect.

Thus, it was determined that the initial motivation and goal to start a blog is directly related to the behavior model that the blogger follows within the framework of a career trajectory in an online environment: where the goal of self-promoting as a specialist and the motivation through mentorship presuppose following the first model, and the affiliation as the main motivation presupposes following the second model. It is also worth emphasizing that an important difference between these models is the way the blog itself is maintained, filled with content, and interacted with the audience. In the first model, the stories format is more often used to motivate users to engage in purchasing services or consulting on competent issues, the content is filled with exercises, tips, and demonstrates the “desired” physical shape. While in the second model, the focus is more on dialogue with the audience, and the content is often filled with “philosophical” reflections.

Searching for balance within the online community and beyond it

One of the most difficult questions for bloggers is the search for balance and harmony, while this applies to both professional activities - how they construct and combine their works, and personal life - how they fit blogging into it, build boundaries of privacy. Although answering the question about combining personal life with professional activity, bloggers claim with confidence that they are good at it. Nevertheless, developing the discussion around the topic of work-life balance, it becomes obvious that there are a number of difficulties that can change the positive thinking of informants.

Directly inside the blogosphere, there are a number of constraining factors that, according to informants, can “unsettle”. First, there is the universal difficulty in finding blog uniqueness, that is formed primarily due to the high competition:

I don't know what my highlight, that is when I work with people personally offline, people came to me for a year, two, three... and if it comes to the blog, I don't know how to transfer my personality into the blog in the same way, so that people will follow me as well as in life “я не понимаю в чем моя изюминка, то есть, когда я работаю с людьми оффлайн лично, люди ко мне ходят год, два, три… а если касается дело блога, то не знаю, как перенести свою личность в блог таким же образом, чтобы люди следовали за мной также как и в жизни” (Интервью 13, Вероника, 23 года)

(Interview 13, Veronika, 23 y.o.)

This difficulty exerts a kind of internal network pressure on informants and also occurs in a slightly different form. Thus, among healthy lifestyle bloggers, the embodiment approach is quite common, which reflects the position of young women to express their own ideas, thoughts and knowledge through the body. More and more women are integrating a variety of meanings, including physical and mental health, nutrition and care practices, into the concept of corporeality, today the body is not just a separate tool. However, in such a wide space as Instagram, there are a lot of people who have a different vision, which is intended to dictate certain “norms” and for nonnormality to express negativity - “hate”. Here, informants sometimes find it difficult to cope with the pressure, for example, in cases where they are required to conform to the canonical image of a healthy lifestyle blogger and “show the perfect body without a gram of cellulite”, such pressure is provided through comments and messages in direct.

The difficulty at the crossroads of public and private space is (not)drawing a border on what is worth putting out and what is not. The boundaries of privacy are blurred due to an attempt to keep, get closer to the audience, which can begin to dictate its own rules, even “manipulate”:

sometimes I have some guilt, it may be due to the fact that I don't tell in the blog what happens in my life, and it can happen in reverse due to the fact that «why am I telling this, I wish I'd never told» (laughing), and, indeed, to catch this border is hard “иногда у меня возникает какое-то чувство вины, оно может возникать и из-за того, что я что-то не рассказываю в блоге, то, что случается у меня в жизни, и оно может и в обратную случаться из-за того, что типа “зачем я это рассказываю, лучше бы я это не рассказывала” (смеется), и, действительно, ловить эту грань тяжело” (Интервью 10, Татьяна, 29 лет)

(Interview 10, Tatiana, 29 y.o.)

Female bloggers admit that they are confused about how much personal information to spread, because of this disbalance and uncertainty, there is a process of burnout, when it becomes unclear how to behave and position themselves in the blog further. Therefore, bloggers often noted that they began to follow the principle of drawing a clear border between personal and public space: “it finally dawned on my young head that personal is not public” “наконец-то до моей молодой головы дошло, что личное - это не публичное” (Интервью 2, Ирина, 21 год) (Interview 2, Irina, 21 y.o.). Thus, we can note the presence of some emotional labor, where bloggers devote a lot of time to “virtual” people, this communication can both fuel or inspire, and exhaust - here it is important to find a balance, “do not depreciate the private space and do not go headlong into the virtual world”. Among attempts to cope with such a problem, informants turn to finding a balance through the formation of a useful habit, new traditions: “Weekend is always a weekend, because my husband works 5 through 2, so Saturday and Sunday we always walk, go somewhere” “Выходные - это всегда выходные, потому что муж работает 5 через 2, и субботу и воскресенье мы всегда гуляем, куда-то ездим” (Интервью 10, Татьяна, 29 лет) (Interview 10, Tatiana, 29 y.o.).

An interesting paradox is observed in the fact that combining professional activities and multitasking as a trait have simultaneously opposite consequences for female bloggers. On the one hand, such a lifestyle, according to the experience of informants, promises a lack of time for other things and an unsettled personal life. Meanwhile, listing such problems, they focus on the fact that they cope with personal failures through their own constant employment - building a career offline and online side by side.

Thereby, we can sum up that finding and maintaining balance is one of the key categories in the lives of healthy lifestyle bloggers, including making their career choices. This aspect has two “challenging zones” - balance in the professional sphere and balancing within the boundaries of privacy and publicity. In the first case, the main difficulties for informants were finding the uniqueness of the blog and negative audience pressure. In the second case, female bloggers highlight among the problems - the blurring of borders and the depreciation of “private space” and the excessive substitution of personal life with professional activities. Nevertheless, meeting and analyzing such difficulties, informants make repeated attempts to overcome them, systematizing their “life schedule” and arranging breaks from professional activities.

Conclusion

As part of this work, a qualitative sociological study was conducted, which included an analysis of theoretical approaches and existing discussions, empirical collection of material by collecting interviews, analyzing the information received, and presenting the results in this work.

The main goal of this thesis was to identify which career choices and strategies are undertaken by healthy lifestyle bloggers and how self-branding is formed among those young women living in Saint-Petersburg, who are active users of the social network Instagram.

Collecting of the in-depth biographical interviews was chosen as the main method, the sampling is criteria-based, and the recruitment was passing via Instagram. As part of the data collection, 14 interviews were collected, while the main difficulty in the field was the high rejection rate - 65% of all cases. Interviews were transcribed and anonymized, and then analyzed through the multi-step coding procedure consisted of open coding and axial encoding performed in QDA Miner Lite, and the thematic analysis method.

Turning to the empirical results of the study, it should be noted that the empirical chapter of this work is built in the logic of research objectives, which will become a “framework” for summarizing the results of this study. The first objective was to identify the main prerequisites and motivations for blogging about sports and nutrition First, through the narratives of informants, it was determined that the current nutrition practices translated in blogs were formed due to a variety of factors that influenced female bloggers in childhood, among them: the "family experience”, where informants were either “overfed” or taught to eat “healthy"; the assessment of appearance by peers, which could include bullying at school; the media as an information channel; sports as a restrictor or proponent of nutritive changes. Here, we can notice how much influence society has on the individual, forming in his mind ideas about the “acceptable” body image and “ideals” of beauty. The result was an active investigation and practical development of various types of food manipulation, for example, almost all informants noted that they had passed through the experience of dieting. In addition, the sports lifestyle also originates from family, children's practices. Thus, the main prerequisite for blogging about a healthy lifestyle and, in particular, about nutrition and sports, was the process of transforming own body and the practices associated with it, even at a young age.

Another objective of this study was to analyze how female healthy lifestyle bloggers manage their career and combine professional activities. The main professional strategy in the analysis was defined as “career reconciliation”, through which bloggers manage their working time and income. This type of employment is caused by changes in the labor market: increased competition, popularization of non-standard employment (“work portfolios” in our case). Thus, three conditional types of “career reconciliation” trajectories were identified: “blogging as an addition to coaching”, “blogging as an addition to the main creative profession”, “combining in multi-tasking mode”; where the main conclusion was that despite all the attractiveness of blogging as a way to earn money, young female bloggers prefer to have a “safety net” in the form of related employment. In addition to the “reconciliation” strategy, two other strategies were identified - personal brand formation and networking. To successfully manage their careers, bloggers use a number of strategies that together become a high-quality basis for career and professional growth.

Third, the task was to find out how female healthy lifestyle bloggers use the media space as part of their career strategies. The studied group is not united by any common way of development in the blogosphere, moreover, women bloggers identified different motives for choosing such a platform for career promotion. However, we were able to identify two conditional models of behavior in the framework of building a career in the network - “blog as a source of income and self-realization” and “blog as a personal diary for self-reflection”. The first model presupposes using the media space as a way to promote the self as a specialist, in order to increase earnings through such a well-developed social network as Instagram. The second model gives bloggers the opportunity to reflect on personal and professional issues publicly in an online environment.

For the last research task, the objective was to analyze what challenges the studied group has to maintain work-life balance as part of their public activities in the online space and how they cope with them. Studying the lifestyle bloggers, it seems that the strategy of “reconciliation” is firmly embedded in their lives, because, in accordance with their narratives, they often do not distinguish blogging from personal, everyday life. Blogging has become a part of it, “fitted” into the daily routine. However, women bloggers cope with a lot of challenges, united precisely by the search for work-life balance.