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This article discusses practices of body optimization in the social context of a permanent struggle for the enhancement of performance and self-improvement that affects all areas of life. First, it considers social psychological, sociological and psychoanalytic approaches to this phenomenon before presenting and interpreting two female case studies from a research project. Pivotal in this regard is the question of how and in what way social needs and demands, on the one hand, can interact with individual biographical dispositions, on the other hand, to create specific forms of (body-related) optimization practices. Since forms of body optimization serve as a means of dealing with psychic problems and conflicts (which, to some extent, have analogous structures to eating disorders), questions concerning the shifts of normality and pathology arise.

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