Eating Disorders & Power

A Woman's Life Shows the Fight between the Power of Respect and the Power of Contempt

Carolyn Adams Miller, born in 1961, began the Foundation for Education on Eating Disorders in Baltimore where she lives with her husband and child. In her book My Name Is Carolyn she tells how, though she appeared like the all-American girl and was a graduate of Harvard University, she was tormented for years by eating disorders. She tells how she was finally able to control these through Overeaters Anonymous.

Mrs. Miller is seen as something of an authority on this subject, has been touted by the press, interviewed on television talk shows and published in women's magazines. But she does not know this crucial thing that Aesthetic Realism explains—contempt is the cause of eating disorders. So while it is important that she has been able to stop hurting herself through food, Mrs. Miller lives in fear her eating disorders will return. She writes:

I know through agonizing experience that my food addiction is out there waiting for me to get cocky and complacent again, and that it will gobble me up if I give it half a chance to come back into my life.

Mrs. Miller admits she does not know what made for her anorexia and bulimia. The one thing she presents as cause, with uncertainty, after much research, is biology. She writes:

I had never been able to understand how a single bite of sugar could lead to such terrible consequences...The only thing that made sense to me was that I had been born with—or had developed through years of bingeing and purging a chemical makeup that left me powerless over sugar and other...foods the minute they hit the blood stream.

There are many descriptions of eating and purging, including with college women who do this together. Carolyn Miller writes about the first time she saw two women eat and purge:

Maybe vomiting wasn't such a terrible way to keep weight off. In fact, it sounded like nirvana. If I could eat all my favorite foods—as much as I wanted—and not gain an ounce then it wouldn't hurt to try it.

This is what my consultants once described as "a neat trick, having the world please you but not affect you." There is also the power a woman has fooling people through secrecy. Mrs. Miller writes:

To the outside world I had it all: good looks, good family, good grades, and athletic abilities. But I also had a side that no one knew about. Almost daily I ate vast quantities of food and got rid of it through vomiting, laxatives, diuretics, syrup of ipecac, or compulsive exercising.

Carolyn Miller was tremendously against herself as I once was. She tells of how, while purging, she punched her stomach so hard she had black and blue marks the next day. She needs to know what only Aesthetic Realism explains—how a young woman could get to such a disgust with herself. Eli Siegel once said to a person that, the high point of his life was his ability to vomit "because you simply say 'I get rid of you world.'"

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