Love her or hate her, everyones favorite Mean Girl is an icon. But, she’s an icon with a secret.
Regina George now has three different castings, but one question has remained through them all…does Regina George have an Eating Disorder?
Today, let’s discuss all the signs showing that Regina George may have been struggling with a secret that she never received support for…
Hidden Trauma
One of the lesser-known facts surrounding Eating Disorders is that they manifest as a way to cope with unprocessed challenges and traumas. It’s safe to say that the movies show us behind her glossy veneer, Regina had a lot going on.
One of the most stark traumas we see is Regina's appearance and youth-obsessed mother, desperately trying to be Regina's peer and friend, rather than the mother she truly needed. We see Mrs George in the original movie simply wanting to hang out with Regina and her friends, and it felt like there was little in the way of real supervision or healthy boundaries going on in her home. We see in one scene Reginas younger sister watching something entirely inappropriate for her age.
In the reboot, we see Mrs George being completely obsessed with youth and appearance, and in one scene, we see Regina having to set a boundary with her mum regarding discussing her body.
Instead of being a mother to Regina, it feels like Mrs George wants to be her friend, her peer, leaving Regina seriously emotionally neglected.
It’s also mentioned briefly by Gretchen in the original that her parents don’t sleep in the same room any more, and that there may be marital issues at home, adding to Regina's bucket of traumas.
Mr George is completely absent in the reboot, and is only seen very briefly in the original at Halloween. We get the sense that Mr George simply isn’t around, he is an absent parent, and like many wealthy absent parents he has replaced love, with money. Regina seems to materially have everything she could ever want, but lacks the one thing she truly needs. Parental love and support.
Eating Disorders often help us find a sense of control in chaos, so now we know some of the reasons behind why Reginas disordered may have developed, let’s unpick what could have been encouraging it.
Dire Diet Culture
An unfortunate dialogue that refuses to die, is diet cultures doctrine “your worth is based on your weight”. Nobody was spared in the 00’s, and Rachel McAdams Regina George was no exception. In multiple scenes we see her discussing her desperation to reduce her weight to 112 pounds, that is 8 stone, or roughly 50 kg. Now as beautiful Rachel McAdams is 5’4, that would be rapidly pushing her version of Regina George to the BMI category of ‘borderline underweight’. Taylor Louderman played Regina in the Broadway original, and at a height of over 5’5, being 112 pounds would have pushed her BMI to 18, ‘clinically underweight’.
Now, those who know me know how much I loathe the BMI scale, so let’s take that with a pinch of salt, and instead look at her restrictive tendencies.
Chronic Calorie Counting
Looking first at the iconic Rachel McAdams in the original movie, we see her firstly engaging in some very odd food rules.
What is a food rule you ask?
Food rules are beliefs around a certain food or food groups about what we should and shouldn’t eat, or even how we should consume certain foods. Food rules tend to be very inflexible, and have roots in diet culture, often labelling certain foods as “good” or “bad”.
Green salad, water, and coke for lunch is all we see initially from the plastics, which frankly, looks like the 00’s diet culture idea - a lunch of practically nothing! Calorie counting is rife during the lunch scenes in both movies, with the original seeing Regina so obsessed with losing weight, she goes on a diet of just cranberry juice, and in the reboot, we see Regina desperately trying to figure out the calorie content of foods to deem them either ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
In fact, Reginas disordered diet culture eating is so bad, that Cady very easily manipulated her into eating the bars meant for weight gain, disguising them as “fat loss” products.
It’s clear that Regina very much feels in the original movie that her worth is based on her weight, and whilst this wasn’t pushed AS hard in the script in the reboot, it’s still felt very strongly. But that’s not the only way the 00’s beauty standards impacted Regina
Body Dysmorphia
In this iconic scene, we see the beautiful Plastics picking apart their appearances, honing in on tiny and invisible flaws on their faces and bodies.
Unfortunately, a combination of patriarchal capitalism and social media has seriously fuelled body dysmorphic symptoms (you can find out more about body dysmorphia in the video linked above and in the comment section). Ultimately, this hyper-focus on non-existent flaws almost certainly fueled Reginas disordered eating, trying to attain the “perfect” body in an attempt to find control over her life, and a sense of self-worth.
The ideal and always unsustainable or unattainable body type for women is constantly changing. In the 00’s we had ultra-thin and often very underweight bodies being flaunted as the ideal, whereas now we have a thin yet curvy figure with racially ambiguous features being seen as perfection.
Realistically so few women ever truly fit the beauty standard because it is so incredibly extreme. This can very quickly push women to over-exercise or into disordered eating to try and reach these toxic ideals of female perfection, and I think we see Regina understandably falling into this trap consistently. Both the wider world and her mother have taught her that her worth is solely based on her appearance.
Binge Eating
During Reginas ‘downfall’ we actually see her Eating Disorder take a u-turn into binge eating. This is highlighted in a few scenes where we see her binge eating. Binge Eating remains one of the most common eating disorder symptoms, and it has absolutely nothing to do with being lazy, greedy or having a lack of motivation, and everything to do with coping with unprocessed trauma.
During the scenes in which we see her binging are at points in her story where she is beginning to lose control of the narrative. Cady has ripped her life apart, and in many ways has removed her coping mechanisms, being “hot” under the male gaze lens, faithful servants, and her status boosting boyfriend.
Binge eating allows us to temporarily detach from the traumas we are experiencing, and self soothe our thoughts away. Of course this often results in weight gain, and we see Regina experience this in the latter half of the movie.
EDNOS
If I were Reginas therapist I would be looking for a diagnosis of EDNOS. EDNOS is the most common type of eating disorder, becuase it is essentially a list of ED symptoms which can’t be ‘boxed’ into another diagnosis. I would love Regina to go through some much needed trauma therapy, and I would highly suspect her recovery would be boosted further by leaving home as a graduated adult, leaving her toxic, absent parents behind.
If you relate to any of Reginas experiences, please reach out to your GP, or a registered professional like myself. Help and support are available, and recovery is possible!
Comments