Emma Pooley might have retired from skilled cycling around a decade in the past, however she believes that the results of under-fueling – what she describes as her “weird” relationship with food – are nonetheless along with her.
Those scars, Pooley says, are “permanent” and embody having a bone density which is “10 to 20 years older than I actually am.”
When it involves eating, the British former cyclist has discovered her mindset to be difficult and infrequently contradictory. Pooley has at all times liked food, not too long ago publishing a cookbook with some of her finest and favourite recipes; however she additionally acknowledges how her biking profession made her develop worrying and unhealthy habits.
“I sort of thought I shouldn’t eat as much, and it took a while to get through that and to realize that, actually, the more I ate, the faster I was,” Pooley tells NCS Sports. “And I didn’t put on weight because I was training lots.”
For most of her racing profession, Pooley says that she believed she was fats, limiting her food regimen and avoiding sure meals when her physique was craving them the most. It’s an strategy that was born out of seeing “really, really skinny people” around her in the peloton, in addition to the false assumption that being lighter makes you a sooner and higher cyclist.
The results of under-eating for skilled athletes, Pooley has found, might be harmful and long-lasting.
“With women, if you’re underweight for a long time, you end up messing your hormones around and (can develop) low bone density,” she says.
“My bone density is lower than it should be, and I keep getting stress fractures. I run lots now – that’s my main sport and I still race competitively. In the last seven years, I’ve had a stress fracture in my femur and a stress fracture in my foot. I don’t know if they’re directly caused by years of under-fueling, but it certainly wouldn’t have helped.”
Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs) happens when an athlete of any gender has overtrained and/or under-eaten for a chronic interval in an try to enhance their efficiency, typically with out figuring out the risks of failing to compensate for the power they expend in coaching and racing.
Poor bone well being is only one knock-on impact. Medical specialists say that REDs can injury an athlete’s metabolism, their immune system, their cardiovascular well being, their menstrual cycle, and their psychological well being, in addition to their athletic efficiency.
The situation isn’t restricted to biking, however under-eating has turn into a flashpoint in the sport lately. A scoping review revealed in December 2022 discovered that aggressive biking has “a high prevalence of disordered eating and/or eating disorders,” whereas a number of athletes have spoken brazenly about their troubled relationships with food.
In an interview with Cycling Weekly final yr, Slovenian Jan Tratnik stated that his desperation to drop some pounds led him to develop bulimia – binge-eating massive quantities of food and purging it to keep away from weight achieve.
“I couldn’t handle being starving, so I cracked and ate too much,” Tratnik stated. “Being afraid to gain weight, it was a circle I couldn’t escape from.”
Cédrine Kerbaol, knowledgeable cyclist and nutritionist, said throughout this yr’s Tour de France Femmes that the sport is at a “dangerous time” in relation to thinness and weight reduction.
“These recent years, it has been very fashionable to count every gram on our plates,” she informed French newspaper L’Humanité. “We must not fall into a form of dehumanization and infantilization.”
Former Tour de France champion and five-time Olympic champion Bradley Wiggins, in the meantime, said in 2019 that “the focus on being light as a rider … can lead to depression, it can lead to things worse than that.”
It’s a mix of elements which make elite cyclists extra inclined to eating disorders and disordered eating, together with riders not wanting to indicate weak spot and dealing with stress from coaches and staff managers.
Pooley, who was topped world time trial champion in 2010 and gained an Olympic silver medal in 2008, has first-hand publicity to what she calls “unscientific kind of bullying” around food from staff officers.
She factors to at least one occasion when, after profitable a race in Montreal, she was reprimanded for ordering a scorching chocolate.
“What I did experience was teams with directors who watched what you ate,” says Pooley. “So with no sort of measure and no science behind it, they only sort of watched you balefully and obtained cross with you in the event you ate the fallacious factor.
“Back when I was racing, certainly from some team directors, they seem to think that enjoying food was in some way wrong because food is just a tool,” she provides. “It’s just fuel, and you shouldn’t enjoy it. If you enjoy food, you’ll get fat. And that is so wrong. I really think that enjoying food is an important part of a healthy diet.”
According to Jack Hardwicke, a social scientist at Nottingham Trent University in England, the notion that biking is a “weight-sensitive sport” is “very engrained from the elite level down,” typically triggering patterns of unhealthy behaviors in riders.
That is even filtered by the language utilized by these in administration positions.
“Coaches have a responsibility that when they’re coaching, what are they focusing on?” Hardwicke tells NCS Sports. “How are they talking about weight? How are they talking about body image? How are they helping athletes develop a healthy relationship between their sport, their health and performance, and what’s the balance?”
In elite biking, Hardwicke provides, “team managers might not see their athletes as humans all the time – they see them as people that they need to perform for the team to survive.”
For riders, the toll of under-eating isn’t just on their our bodies, but in addition on their psychological wellbeing.
“When you speak to people that have suffered with eating disorders and disordered eating, the mental battle is really the biggest part,” says Hardwicke. “It’s very closely aligned with things like body image issues, self-confidence issues … I think that’s where the real issue is.”
When contacted by NCS Sports, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), biking’s international governing physique, referred to a earlier statement on REDs syndrome, which stated: “The UCI’s position is to lift consciousness of the well being dangers related to uncontrolled weight reduction, and to help docs with sources to facilitate their work in scientific apply.
“For this, the UCI is in the process of finalising documentation and tools that can be used by team doctors to enable the diagnosis of REDs. The strategy is to rely on a screening and risk-assessment tool validated and published by an International Olympic Committee (IOC) consensus group.”
As for Pooley, she admits that biking has “changed a lot” since she initially retired in 2014, with the most profitable groups “encouraging riders to eat better and eat more.”
Today, she firmly believes that food and sport kind a pure partnership – “the more you train, the more you have to eat,” provides Pooley – and has made robust, psychological connections between moments in her biking profession and issues she ate at the time.
That affiliation is partly why the 43-year-old determined to publish “Oat to Joy,” which is an element recipe e-book impressed by the humbleness and flexibility of oats, half autobiography chronicling food-based recollections from her biking profession.
“I can exactly remember the pizza at the end of the Giro (d’Italia) in 2011 after I didn’t win,” says Pooley. “Certainly, with races, I can remember the special food that we had the dinner after. I’m just really good at remembering what I ate.”
Her aggressive biking days behind her, Pooley has now returned to her past love: working. She competes in path occasions, twice ending eleventh in world championship races, and normally solely cycles for enjoyable.
And at any time when she is tempted to go out on her bike, Pooley will at all times you should definitely make “even more cafe stops than before” – a luxurious her skilled profession didn’t at all times afford.