Poetic Justice is an advice column that offers better advice to submissions at other publications whose advice has failed the reader.
The Ethicist columnist for the New York Times counseled a reader anxious about a close friend’s weight to ignore the problem altogether.
Last week, a reader wrote to the paper’s appointed “ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, to seek advice on how to approach a friend of half a century over their dangerously deteriorating health. Here’s what they wrote:
My friend of 50 years has recently become morbidly obese. She now must be 100-plus pounds overweight on a very small frame. She has great difficulty breathing, and her legs are bowed out from being crushed under her weight. She can no longer perform simple household tasks like cleaning.
I love my friend, and have tried several times to speak to her gently about her worsening condition. But to no avail. She says she cannot afford the new diet-drug-by-injection everyone is using; she has given up trying to lose the weight any other way.
Food is her drug. It is clear she lives for it as an addict would. She steadfastly refuses to talk to me or her family about it. She apparently skirts around the issue when talking to her primary-care provider, and nothing ever changes: Her weight continues to go up.
I have thought about approaching her children about this. But if that doesn’t work, and the children tell my friend I tried to intervene, I am sure that would
