Adele Hite weighs in (pun intended) on AHS12:
Right now, “looking the paleo part” is important in the paleo community. … It is easier for you to become a valued member of a community if you look the part. Why? Because health, especially dietary health, is—for us middle class white people—a stand-in for character.
“Looking the part” demonstrates to the world that you are, indeed, a “responsible good eater.” If you are overweight, if you have obvious health deficits, if you are not white, if you are old—you stray from the community’s ideal of a “responsible good eater”—no matter what your diet actually is. Not “looking the part” tars you, however subtly, with the brush of “unhealthy other.”
Be sure to visit her blog to read the whole thing. I’m very much looking forward to part 2, “Paleo: Just Another Elitist Fad for Skinny White People Wearing Goofy Shoes–or NOT?“
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our modern culture -- especially diet. Beth writes about ancestral health, health policy, & mindfulness. And cats! 
She makes some great points, and just reading the tidbit above makes Paleo sound like…a cult! Perhaps it’s best to embrace whatever lifestyle is best for you (the “general” you) and not worry about what it “looks” like?
Ah, yes. And in the immortal words of Fernando Lamas (via Billy Crystal), as everybody SHOULD KNOW by now, “It is better to look good than to feel good!”
The SELLING of anything (product, idea, movement…) has almost always focused on surface appearances, through impression management-the salesperson’s subtle manipulation of external images and rhetoric to produce the outcome desired by the seller. Thus, with the stated desire of “helping” the prospective consumer to attain his/her own needs, the seller sets out with the intention to control the outcome of the transaction by getting the buyer to see and to believe that which the seller WANTS the buyer to see and to believe.
I’ve never liked the dishonesty of that approach. And I’m not sure why anyone feels the desire-or the compulsion-to sell their own perspectives and beliefs about nutrition to others. I don’t understand why it becomes almost like a spiritual mission to change other people’s views and behaviors-to create converts whose views and practices are in alignment with those of the seller.
I just don’t see how other people’s beliefs about nutrition, and other people’s choices and behaviors connected with eating, should be of any concern to me-unless the others’ choices and behaviors result from social injustice-as is the case when people are expected to, or encouraged to, follow a particular kind of diet when social conditions construct barriers that disallow the particular diet as an option from which to choose.