I judge, in a way when I see someone very overweight, my eyes and mind tell me they are very overweight, but that's all it tells me. I have plenty of overweight friends. Some of them smoke too much too. Doesn't mean I agree with their choices by being friends with them, but they have other much more redeeming qualities that I admire.
Being overweight doesn't stop them from being good, productive, respectful, loving people. I don't care if they have a medical condition, don't care if they just eat poorly. Well I do, I try to get everyone to make more healthy decisions, but what they eventually choose isn't my main priority in life.
But I think genetics and medical conditions get far, far, too much credit in this country. We live like crap. We do. We eat like crap, even when we eat "healthy" we're are usually eating like crap. Thyroid conditions are awesome cause you can blame something else. They are as much a function of diet and exercise as anything.
our Thyroids and genetics have not changed in the past 50 years, but our lifestyles sure have. Diets based on cheap nutritionally defunct food and convenience have not been kind to our waistlines or our health. You can certainly give yourself a thyroid condition, and in fact many have. Not because their thyroid was broken, but because their lifestyle made it dysfuctional over time. They weren't given a bad thyroid or bad genes.
Sure it can be tested for and given medication to treat. Normal function can also be achieved with different lifestyle choices.
I'm the exception to your "rules" above
I grew up outside the US, I have always been skinny, like spine and ribs visible skinny. Not in a bad way, just the way I'm put together. For nearly 4 decades I never had much issue keeping a healthy weight. If I gained, I just upped the exercise, ate 1 cookie instead of 3 and that was that.
In my 20's I was diagnosed with an enlarged thyroid that became nodular in my 30's. Eventually it turns out it had grown around some rather important parts in my neck, so I had to have it removed.
I did not create a thyroid problem in myself. I lived in 3rd world countries and one of the things my parents used to do was drop iodine tablets in the water so they wouldn't get sick from it. My maternal grandmother also had thyroid problems and seeing as she was born in 1903, and worked on a farm most of her life, I don't think it was lifestyle related.
When my thyroid was removed, since it was growing all around different structures in my neck, the surgeon accidentally nicked one of the nerves in my neck that controls the vocal cords and things like breathing and swallowing. Long story short, even after I had healed from surgery, the damage to that nerve made it so that when I exercised, my airway would seize up much like when you're about to cry and you feel like you can't breathe. Even longer story short, I gained over 50 pounds in 3 years.
I don't live like crap or eat like crap any more than the next mostly aware american who tries to be healthy. I just suffer way more consequences than they do. Yet folks will look at me and assume I don't exercise and assume I don't eat healthy. I do both.
I know what I need to do to get the weight off, it's just not a priority for me as I'm very healthy otherwise. I run and play with the kids and dogs, (can't do the trampoline with them, but that's not a weight thing, it's a mommy bladder thing
) My BP is perfect - sometimes even in the low range of normal, my bloodwork is great. I'm perfectly healthy, just fat. If I lost weight, absolutely nothing about me would change, nothing in my life would change, I would just wear smaller clothes. There is a lot more to people than what size they are.
As for the blog, I think she's reading way too much in to folks' expressions and what they're looking at. I'm one of those people who stares off in to space thinking about something and looks like I'm looking at a person, when really I'm off in my own mind, not thinking about what I'm looking at at all.