Eating Disorders & Power

Power and How We See and Use Food

In Self and World, in some of the most beautiful prose I ever read, Eli Siegel explains:

The taking of food is more than nutrition alone, it is also a profound homage of the self to its surroundings. We are saying when we eat, and with humility too, that we need the world from which our food comes. We say, unconsciously, when we eat well: Bless reality which gives us our daily nutriment.—If we can't logically bless, our daily bread will be a daily peril.

In these sentences is what every person needs to know who has ever suffered from anorexia, which is self starvation, and bulimia—eating large quantities of food non-stop and then purging what you eat through self-induced vomiting.

Food, Aesthetic Realism explains is either a means of our having respect for the world, or having contempt. At its best, eating is organic respect for the world, a desire to like it and take it in. But if a person doesn't like the world, she will either not want to have food inside of her at all, or she will take it inside in a way that is contemptuous. This is what happened to me and why for 10 agonizing years my daily bread was "a daily peril."

I say with my grateful, happy life and healthy body that the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel explains definitively that eating disorders are caused by contempt for the world. My suffering ended because my consultants explained the cause. They showed me that: "bulimia is a way of managing, having the world please you but not affect you deeply; anorexia is a means of having yourself pure, without any additions. Both arise from contempt."

Learning this was like radiant, clear sunlight in what had been a dark, miserable cave. I learned to see food with a respect and pleasure that I never thought was possible. I love Aesthetic Realism for this.

I first became bulimic the summer before 9th grade. I was afraid of entering high school with the older students. I was angry that my body was changing, becoming more womanly and round, and this seemed different from my taller, more slender friends. When I gained a few pounds and heard two young men comment about this, I felt humiliated. I secretly began staying home from school, disconnecting the phone so no one from school could call my parents, and would eat. I ate large quantities of food—such as four containers of yogurt, a box of cereal, last night's pot of spaghetti, garlic bread, and dessert—then disgorged all of what I had eaten.

Afraid that I would binge at every meal, I took diet pills and amphetamines which gave me more energy and made me feel I didn't need any food at all. I starved myself for weeks; I lost a lot of weight and once fainted from lack of food. I had anorexia. What is happening now to women all over America happened to me. I began to lose my hair, my menstruation stopped, I had dizzy spells, my face was swollen from so much vomiting and my teeth were beginning to erode. I was very frightened about what I was doing to myself but I couldn't stop.

As the years went on, I tried everything to stop, to no avail. Then I began to study Aesthetic Realism. In an early consultation, my consultants asked: "Do you think...you came to feel the world was a messy place?" "Yes," I said.

Consultants. Did you change tremendous confusion and discontent with the world into the triumph of being able to manage it?

Meryl Nietsch. Yes.

Consultants. Do you think this eating and vomiting situation is anger and confusion turned into the triumph of contempt—and what you have is a very dramatic and organized way of saying "I don't need the world"?

Meryl Nietsch. Yes, I think so!

I felt understood to my depths by these questions, and I have seen with every year since that they explain women now suffering with eating disorders. In one consultation when I said, "I do feel better after I have gotten the food out of me," my consultants explained it was because, "You feel you've beaten the world, you're running things." And they explained so kindly:

Miss Nietsch, you are not different from everybody else; your mode of showing your dislike, disgust with reality may not be the most common one, but what it comes from is what has run humanity for centuries.

I came to see that even as I suffered, I had made myself terrifically important feeling I was unique and that nothing could change this awful situation. And though sometimes I fought my consultants, it was a terrific relief for me to see through scientific principles that I was like other people.

I also love the humor my consultants had about what I wanted to see as both my ability and the biggest tragedy. They once asked me, "Do you think you see food a little like a devout Catholic sees the Vatican? It's religious." They said:

Some people wear gold crosses or stars around their necks. You should get yourself a little refrigerator charm, a little Westinghouse.

And they asked this beautiful question, "Do you think if you see food as honestly showing what the world is like, you won't exploit it and you won't want to expel it?" "Yes," I said, and this is what I am so grateful to say is what happened to me.

Food, I learned, puts opposites together, the same opposites that were fighting in me—softness and toughness, inside and outside. For example, deep dish blueberry pie, which I love to make, is tart and sweet, soft and firm, light and dark. The blueberries inside the pie retain their firm round shape even as their juice mixes and bakes with the soft flour, eggs and butter. And while the filling inside is a deep, dark rich purple, on top is a light golden, powdery crust. And I learned that these opposites—hard and soft, light and dark, sharpness and sweetness, are in me too, in my family, in all people.

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