My father isn't svelte on paleo, but he looks SO MUCH BETTER. Ditto for my mother. I don't think they are going to regain the slimness they had in their twenties, but everyone notices they look better and people have adopted paleo because of them.

But then again, they aren't going around marketing paleo as a weight-loss diet fad. On my own site I've never promised people they will become lean on paleo. There is no study showing that this diet has that ability. But people have the potential to return to a more comfortable weight and feel much better. I just read an advance copy of "Why Women Need Fat" and I was amazed that the book didn't promise women that their dietary regimen would make them thin. The real struggles diet book authors themselves encounter are a testament to how hard it is to get lean, particularly when you have been overweight for a long time, are a woman, or are older.

If you want to influence friends, family, co-workers and others who know and love you the best way to start is to look/feel better than you have for years.

If you want to be a guru, I assert you don't have to have an ideal body profile you just need to give advice that works.

Coach K is a lion of college basketball yet he's a little short guy. Coach Bellichek is a lion of the NFL and he looks more like an accountant than anything else. If I were a player, I'd want those coaches over one who looked the part but didn't have a winning record.

Just win, baby!

IMHO Paleo has more to do with overall gut health and body composition is just value added.

Apart from healing my gut and my overall GI challenges, I can honestly say that my body composition accurately reflects my food composition. 250 g of protein daily, 70 grams of carbs on training days (strictly PWO), 20 grams of carbs on off days, and the rest in fat in the forms of raw almond butter, grass fed butter, and avocado.

Well, here is a paleolithic female body ....

http://arthistoryresources.net/willendorf/willendorfdiscovery.html

So - what do we conclude from this??!!

Some people (like me) are never going to be perfect physical specimens! And whatever I do, I am not going to stop being middle-aged. I will never be as appealing a role model as a young, hard-bodied person!

I think actually it would be a bit odd if people were encouraged not to speak about paleo just because they were a bit fat.

Who would decide who was fit to be a spokesperson/role model? What are the criteria for judging their fitness?

At the end of the day, the rational criterion would be their good health (or a big improvement on previous ill health).

It kind of depends on whether you see Paleo being a weight loss diet or a diet for health. Weight loss is much more than just eating healthy and maintaining weight.

If the idea is that paleo is weight loss for the masses, then I would expect to see a lot of lean people speaking for it. Actually getting to your goal weight is often the most significant achievement.

I do think paleo helps with a lot of basics towards losing weight, but actually losing weight can be very difficult and is a lot different than just preventing obesity. I am skeptical for most people that just eating paleo will get people to their goal weight.

I've always told women I've known who ask me for tips to help them lose weight that weight doesn't matter, it's about how you feel. Some people will be thinner, others will be heavier, and body fat percentage is more important than weight, but even that varies. Any diet that's specifically focused on helping you lose weight is bound to fail because it's working on the wrong problem. The Paleo diet will help you reach your optimal weight, whatever that may be, because the reason most people these days are either underweight or overweight is due to not eating the way nature intended them to. You know yourself better than anyone else, and you know when you feel good and have lots of energy, so experiment with your diet til you find one that gives you the most energy and health. Then you won't need to count calories anymore.

noo. I've always been skinny, and Paleo has made me skinnier, but more musclely looking. To have a nice body, I need to be able to put on fat, which is something I havent had since I was 1 year old.

I think the conception that any non-mainstream item has to put it's "best foot forward" to the world by displaying it's brightest peacocks is detrimental to that item. People who look perfect are not relateable, and can come off as corny testimonies like "look! Eat steak and lose 10 lbs! Are my teeth white enough yet?". It isn't very relateable, and really takes the genuine message out of the picture. That's one of my major problems with the vegan movement- there are conferences where they do not supply L or XL shirts, just in case people didn't get the message enough.

Being an inspiration is not about embodying perfection- it's about experiencing feeling good, and sharing it upon prompting without feeling judged. My mom is my role model, and she is never going to have the body she had when she was 20, and that's fine, because she is still a strong, happy woman. She will never look like she didn't have three pregnancies and a few surgeries that caused major scarring, nor does she want to- she's not ashamed of her kids or being sick in the past, so why should she be ashamed that her body reflects that? She is just as "qualified" to give advice and discuss her lifestyle as anyone else is.

In my internship I've had morbidly obese to moderately overweight patients who receive unsolicited advice in random places from complete strangers who tell them they "have the answer to their problem". People who glare at the one chocolate bar in a grocery cart full of food, or tell them that if they just moved more they wouldn't be so darn imposing. I think this is totally invasive and heartbreaking, because nobody knows what is going on in their life!! Are they recovering from surgery? Did they just have a baby? Are they at a really stressful point of their life? Are losing weight gradually, which is the healthiest most sustainable way to lose it? Are they on anti-psychotic medications? Are they treating a thyroid problem? The answers to these questions don't matter anyways, because it is not our place to judge people we don't know, and people shouldn't have to justify their appearance for anyone. I say, we should all be taken on the value of our advice and our personalities, not our appearances in a perfect world. Hopefully we can move away from our projected prejudices in our own way, and appreciate healthy and advice in every form that it comes.

Comes down to your personality. Do you readily share your beliefs and/or scientific claims for healthier living with other people? If so, shout it to anyone you want to. Talk about it in the grocery line, at the bank, or to your postman if you want. If not then its fine to just do what you do with a clear conscience that you are making an informed effort to live a healthier lifestyle.

I do not think your current physique is going to nor should it trump how you wish to express yourself to others...

i was under the impression everyone at PH was chiseled like marble...

lol but who said "Paleo" had to be a perfect gym body? Not that we're ruminants but even as Kurt Harris mentioned, wild animals are not as lean as you'd think. We shouldn't be fat and obese, but depending on your genes/ancestry, I don't think everyone's optimal would equal Rocky or Brad Pitt.

Why speak up? You're doing it for your health, and if someone likes what they see in you they'll copy. My sister walks a lot more than she used to, has lost a lot of fat, and I'm partly to blame. Others see me walking and ridicule me.

My first exposure to paleo was my brother-in-law's "caveman diet". It had no effect on his distended gut and I thought it was just an excuse to eat more red meat. His bragging didn't match the visible results, and so for several years I regarded paleo as some kind of a joke.

Image obsessed culture will always want perfect looking people to push a message. We ought to be focused on health improvement but we aren't. Should be though. Cancer will eat a pretty face just as fast as a fat one, maybe faster with less body fat. I know that the PETA vegans look to put naked thin chicks on billboards and pretend that there aren't any old fat people. I'd hate to see the paleo movement do that.

I think there is a misconception that eating healthy (i.e. cutting out grains and eating more produce and choosing quality wild and free ranging animals) is the same thing as eating to significantly improve body composition. And, eating to improve body composition is different than eating for weight loss. There are certain tweaks that must be made to improve body comp. Off the top of my head, things like reducing saturated fat and increasing lean protein consumption. Whatever you lose from not eating things like ghee/butter/cream, liver, and an abundance of animal fat will likely be outweighed by the health improvement of increased physical fitness. The nice thing about getting into shape is that once you're there, you can add these foods back in without hardly any detriment to body composition, but getting there they have to go. YOu can eat for weight loss, you can eat for fat loss, and you can eat for health. All of these are slightly different.

However, you can be "overweight" and still be healthy if you are taking good care of yourself with quality diet and at least some exercise and stress reduction. A pale diet can definitely improve health w/o resulting in any weight or fat loss.

I think the pale diet as a base is great for so many reasons, but improved body composition is not one of those.

I hope this helps. Oh so to answer your question no you dont have to have a perfect bod to represent

There's an amount of abdominal fat deposition that increases mortality (in males usually, though some females have an android fat deposition pattern) due to the higher transmembrane flux of the visceral adipocytes. This creates more FFA in the bloodstream, which the liver packages as TGs. We know VLDL-TGs to be prone to oxidation and may form arterial plaques as a result. As such, a level of fatness that deranges blood lipids is of course unhealthy, but anything below that threshold is likely innocuous, unless it deters an individual from being active, which we know to decrease most types of common causes of death. What I'm getting at is that there's a somewhat narrow range of "fat and healthy" that exists.

Regarding the ability to effectively proselytize people to a healthier lifestyle, you'll find that it becomes decreasing difficult as BF% declines up until you become ghoulish, at which point it starts to reverse.