In An Outline of Aesthetic Realism, Mr. Siegel writes about food:

A child grows from 12 pounds to 80 pounds through making the world himself. In eating anything, we assimilate the world; that is, the world becomes like ourselves.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that whenever we see food, there is a question that is not stated but should be: Is this a chance for me to respect the world or have contempt for it? My attitude was to grab disproportionately and then dismiss.

For ten years—from age fourteen to twenty four—I suffered from a combination of the eating disorders anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Anorexia is self-starvation and excessive weight loss. Bulimia is eating non-stop, then disgorging all of what you eat.

I thought this would never change, and the side effects were devastating. I suffered from hair loss, loss of periods, dizziness, kidney infections, dehydration and cysts on my knees from excessive exercise. At this time I was very depressed and lonely, and my parents were desperate. They took me to doctors, psychologists and weight control centers. I took diet pills and later was addicted to speed.

A psychiatrist told me I was suffering from chronic depression, and his plan was to enter me into group therapy and administer antidepressants. This frightened me more, because no one had a clear explanation of the cause or seemed hopeful that my trouble about food would stop. I couldn’t read, couldn’t care deeply for a man, and I couldn’t sing, something I had once loved to do. I spent most of my time alone.

The Explanation

When I began to study Aesthetic Realism, I found the explanation. In his book Self and World Eli Siegel writes:

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.

I began to have consultations at the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York. Early, my consultants asked me, “Do you think it is possible that a way of seeing the whole world is present in how you deal with food?”

Meryl Nietsch.  Yes, I do.

Consultants.  Do you want to grab it and get rid of it? Do you want to be controlled by reality or control it?

Meryl Nietsch.  I like to be able to control things.

My consultants said about bulimia, “It’s a neat trick. It’s like the metaphor “having your cake and eating it too.” You have the world please you but not affect you in the way biology and botany want it to. Aren’t you a little proud of this?”

I felt I had it down to a science. I would choose certain foods to binge on because they came up easier. In consultations, I was asked to write about the advantages of vomiting and why I thought it was smart. Doing this assignment, I saw how contempt worked in me, and I simply couldn’t continue this procedure. I was able to keep my food down.

Anger and Confusion Turned into Triumph

In an issue of People magazine, Cherry Boone O’Neill, author of the book on anorexia Starving for Attention, writes, “When you start denying yourself food…it’s exhilarating. The anorexic feels that while she may not be able to control anything else, she will, by God, control every morsel that goes into her mouth.” Without knowing it, Mrs. O’Neill is describing the pleasure of contempt.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism how I came to a way of seeing the world that was to result in these eating disorders. My parents had a big job bringing up six children, and we didn’t make it easy. In our home there were a lot of fights and coldness. I was asked in a consultation, “Do you think, Miss Nietsch, that you came to feel the world was a messy place?”

Meryl Nietsch.  Yes.

Consultants.  Do you think that this eating and vomiting situation is anger and confusion turned into the triumph of contempt?

Meryl Nietsch.  Yes, I do.

Consultants.  Eli Siegel would often give the example of contempt, that a “high point” in a person’s life was his ability to vomit. It is a saying, “I get rid of you, world!” Do you have a very dramatic and organized example of saying, “I don’t need the world?”

I learned that I wanted to have myself pure, untouched by the outside world, but that this choice was keeping me from something I wanted more: to like the world on an honest basis.

In an early consultation, Ellen Reiss composed three couplets with humor that had me see my disorders in relation to the world:

The same universe in which I vomit
Has clouds, and also a star, and a comet.

When I meet something in the world, I will either become it,
Or get rid of it by trying to vomit.

I feel like a queen, or at least a duchess or a duke
Every time I can eat something and puke.

Food Puts Opposites Together

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that I worshipped food: I made it the most important thing in the world. I used to say, “Food is my world.”

I was so ashamed of the way I saw it that I felt I couldn’t go out with people or to parties. I knew there was something wrong when I thought more about getting to the table with the food than about getting to know the people at the party. My consultants asked me: “Do you think you see food as your Mecca? Some people wear crosses or gold stars around their necks. You should get yourself a little refrigerator charm.”

My eating disorders stopped in 1981 because of what I learned. Today I eat three meals a day like a normal person, and I never have to worry about my health the way I once did.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that the world, like a person, has a structure of opposites which can be counted on: it is aesthetic, the oneness of opposites, the same opposites that are in us. I began to study the opposites in food.

I saw, for example, that cottage cheese is both smooth and rough. It has smooth liquid and curds of harder cheese. And I have flesh that is soft and supple and bones and muscles that are hard and firm. Studying the opposites made me feel that I was stronger through being affected deeply by the world.

The clear explanation of the cause of eating disorders is in the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel. I want my life to be useful so that the hundred thousand anorexics in the United States alone will not face a prospect of dying of heart failure, infections, irreversible hypoglycemia, and simple starvation. I am one of the luckiest people on this earth because I have met truth about the world and myself.

The post I Learned This about Food appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

Power is not just the ability to affect or change others; it is likewise the ability to be affected or changed by others. If a person’s power is only of the first kind, his unconscious will be in distress.

I learned that there are two kinds of power people are after. The power of respecting the world—being affected by and seeing value in people, books, world events, history—strengthens us and makes us proud.

But there is another power we go after which hurts and weakens us. It is the desire to have contempt, which Eli Siegel defined as “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self increase as one sees it.” Women go after this kind of power every day in offices and homes as they try to “affect or change others,” manage them while not being affected themselves—making them feel empty and ashamed. Studying the difference between these two purposes changed the direction of my life.

Like many women today, I wanted to have a big effect on others, particularly men, through the way I looked, while I remained cool, aloof and unaffected. I also went after power through physical strength—exercising, lifting heavy things without assistance, and participating in sports. But I didn’t want to think about how much my body could actually do, and sometimes I hurt myself. With every year the way I went after conquering people and things hurt my mind and body.

I’ll write about of one dramatic form this took in my life—the eating disorders anorexia and bulimia, which I suffered from for 10 years. The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD) reports that anorexia and bulimia are “life-threatening illnesses that afflict an estimated seven million women and one million men in our country.” Because of what I learned from Aesthetic Realism, these disorders ended in me completely.

Two Kinds of Power

As a young girl, I cared very much for the land of Long Island with its lush green trees, flowers, and the great Atlantic Ocean. I remember the first time I saw that wide expanse of sand and ocean, and the sound and beauty of the waves as they advanced and retreated from the shore. And I liked sailing on the Great South Bay. I didn’t know it then, but sailing has so much to do with a beautiful power, “the ability to be affected.” It was thrilling to see how the sail yielded to and took in a strong wind, which then gave the boat the power to sail so gracefully and swiftly through the water.

But I also wanted another kind of power—to have the biggest effect and to get people to do what I wanted. Once, I calculatingly and demurely coaxed my Aunt Edna over to a shoe store window and said so sweetly, “Look, this is what all the girls are wearing.” They were white go-go boots, and I knew full well that she would buy them for me. Later, I felt uneasy because I had taken advantage of her.

Years later, in a discussion in an Aesthetic Realism Class, the Chairman of Education, Ellen Reiss, explained so truly what had been an industry in me about power when she said, “You found out you could look innocent and pretty, and you’ve used it.”

I didn’t know it then, but the way I used my father to think I was the center of the universe and should be made much of—this made working to know other things and being affected by them look increasingly dull in comparison.

On the one hand, at Birch Lane Elementary School, I would spend hours in art class drawing or painting something I liked, and loved playing the flute in the band and singing in the choir. But at other times, in math or science lessons, my teacher would have to call me a few times before I would snap out of a dreamy state. As the years went on I found it increasingly difficult to read, or concentrate on anything outside of myself.

Many years later, the pain I had about this was understood in an Aesthetic Realism consultation when my consultants explained so kindly and centrally about how I had come to see the whole world—and these words describe, too, the state of mind making for eating disorders: “You feel that the Meryl of Meryl is you and the Meryl touched by other things isn’t you. You are not sure you want anything to be a part of you.”

I learned that like many children, I used the pain and confusion of my family to have contempt, to be disgusted and lessen the meaning of things. I didn’t understand my parents—they could dance in the living room after dinner and then later get so angry with each other. Like many families today, they were worried about money and there were fights. Often our dinner table—with my parents and five brothers and me—was a battle-ground with shouting matches, or cold silences.

But I didn’t want to know what either of my parents felt, including my father who worked very long hours, to support his family. Instead, I exploited their pain to feel this world was no good and I had a right to dismiss everyone. I was competitive with my brothers and often when I felt angry I would go to my room and slam the door or go out, get on my bicycle and ride for hours. I was, what my consultants once described so accurately, “a top notch discarder and professional door slammer.”

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.

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.'”

Liking the World or Beating It

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that the one opposition to that in every person which wants to have contempt—dismiss things and get rid of them—is the desire to like the world.

Carolyn Adams Miller apparently liked learning in school, liked swimming, becoming a champion swimmer in her hometown. But from a very early age, she was fiercely competitive. Working on this paper, I have come to see that competition is central in the life of a person who has eating disorders. For example, Carolyn Miller writes of herself as a young girl:

My parents began to make comments, especially comparing me with my older sister, whom I began to hate with a passion. Even at my thinnest points, nothing in her closet ever fit me, which enraged and embarrassed me. To get back at her, I competed in other arenas…piano recitals, grades test scores, and so on, flaunting the results if I came out on top.

I know that feeling—I was also competitive with other girls and angry that God didn’t make me differently. I wanted to be tall and lean and was jealous of my friends who were. I was determined that if I couldn’t be tall, at least I could be thin. Sometimes I was so angry about this that I wouldn’t even go out because I thought other girls looked so much better than I did. Mrs. Miller writes:

No one could possibly be better than I in anything without inviting my criticism. So whenever my parents had praised one of my friends…I…immediately rejoined with something negative about that person…This attitude affected me at work too. If someone I perceived as incompetent made more than me or got a raise, I went on a verbal rampage, decimating him or her to whomever would listen.

This contempt hurt Carolyn Miller very much. And even as she says these things, she is not against them. She never says straight that she was wrong to see people in this competitive way.

Mrs. Miller describes being fascinated by the vomitoriums of the Roman Empire. I, too, had found them very attractive when I learned about them in the sixth grade. When I spoke about this in a consultation, it was pointed out to me that these vomitoriums took place during the decline of the Roman Empire when the Romans were most brutal. Ellen Reiss asked these tremendously kind questions which changed my life:

Do you think there is anything else in history that’s beautiful that you can imitate? It happens that the literature of Rome has been held onto by the world…there are lines in Latin literature that are beautiful and can have a person feel that there’s emotion that she’s proud of having. So what would you rather do, get inspired by a Roman vomitorium, or lines like these from Virgil, which I shall quote in English, and the world has not wanted to forget them: “These are the tears of things, and touch the mind of man.” [And in Latin] “Sunt lachrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.” So which means more to you, the ability to vomit or the ability to hear that which lasted for many centuries?

Meryl Nietsch. The ability to hear that!

I love Ellen Reiss for her kindness and knowledge. Hearing this, what I had been so ashamed of was now in relation to the culture and beauty of the world.

Where I once felt I would have to spend the rest of my life living the hell of eating disorders, I now eat and enjoy three healthy meals a day. I eat what I like but with care and a respect that I never thought was possible.

In a class Eli Siegel once said, “The only thing that can combat the desire to eat excessively is the desire to know.” Aesthetic Realism freed my mind to know and like the world and be deeply affected by it—and it is the most thrilling good time! This includes knowing my family, being interested in people’s lives, reading some of the great literature of the world by George Eliot, Thackery, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, my study of the flute and music.

And this also includes my knowing of Aesthetic Realism Consultant, Bennett Cooperman, whom I love and am proud to be married to. I have been deeply stirred by the relation of thoughtfulness and exuberance in Bennett, and his humorous and straight criticism of me has made me a better person and had me care more for the whole world. As we study together in classes taught by Ellen Reiss, we are learning what all of America deserves to know—how the principles of Aesthetic Realism explain people and the world itself.

I’ll end with some lines from Eli Siegel’s great poem What Food Deserves: A Canticle, published in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known:

When our strength is spent,
There’s nothing like nourishment
To bring it back, back, back.
We go to the world again,
We eat a something, and then
We feel we’ve regained what we were.
Food can be a making of love
To the world we know.
We go to and fro,
But we come back to food,
Waiting for us.

And the poem ends:

So in a state of seemly elation,
We hail food;
And we hope that we have a just attitude
To our great friend, food,
Though seen wrongly, it can upset.
Food, though, deserves to be seen rightly,
Ever increasingly.
And if that goes on,
The unease that many feel about food
Will have gone.
Food will be seen as grace itself.

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