Fardels of the Heart: Obesity and the Unbearable Heaviness of Being

Abstract

Health problems related to excessive weight or obesity have acquired major importance in modern Western societies. In Australia it is said that nearly two thirds of people are overweight and about one third are obese. A long list of health problems is attributed to or associated with excessive weight and the economic cost is said also to be great.

And send us prying into the abyss, To gather what we shall be when the frame Shall be resolved to something less than this Its wretched essence;

It is enough in sooth that once we bore These fardels of the heart – the heart whose sweat was gore.

Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Fourth

[H]uman affliction is an appeal to be cared for and taken care of[;] it thereby requires the afflicted person to put himself or herself… in the hand of others. It is essentially a trust relationship that is evoked, and it is trust in a special sense: namely, trust in the context of initial, vital vulnerability and diminishment of selfhood… [T]hose to whom this appeal is addressed… are called on precisely to be responsive to just this specific afflicted person in his or her very condition and responsive for his or her actual well-being and life…

Richard Zaner, Ethics and the Clinical Encounter (1988, p. 310)