Former cyclist Emma Pooley witnessed ‘unscientific bullying’ around food amid the sport’s high prevalence of eating disorders

By George Ramsay, CNN

(CNN) — Emma Pooley may have retired from professional cycling around a decade ago, but she believes that the effects of under-fueling – what she describes as her “weird” relationship with food – are still with her.

Those scars, Pooley says, are “permanent” and include having a bone density which is “10 to 20 years older than I actually am.”

When it comes to eating, the British former cyclist has found her mindset to be complicated and often contradictory. Pooley has always loved food, recently publishing a cookbook with some of her best and favorite recipes; but she also recognizes how her cycling career 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 CNN Sports. “And I didn’t put on weight because I was training lots.”

For most of her racing career, Pooley says that she believed she was fat, restricting her diet and avoiding certain foods when her body was craving them the most. It’s an approach that was born out of seeing “really, really skinny people” around her in the peloton, as well as the false assumption that being lighter makes you a faster and better cyclist.

The effects of under-eating for professional athletes, Pooley has discovered, can be dangerous 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) occurs when an athlete of any gender has overtrained and/or under-eaten for a prolonged period in an attempt to improve their performance, often without knowing the dangers of failing to compensate for the energy they expend in training and racing.

Poor bone health is just one knock-on effect. Medical experts say that REDs can damage an athlete’s metabolism, their immune system, their cardiovascular health, their menstrual cycle, and their mental health, as well as their athletic performance.

The condition isn’t limited to cycling, but under-eating has become a flashpoint in the sport in recent years. A scoping review published in December 2022 found that competitive cycling has “a high prevalence of disordered eating and/or eating disorders,” while several athletes have spoken openly about their troubled relationships with food.

In an interview with Cycling Weekly last year, Slovenian Jan Tratnik said that his desperation to lose weight led him to develop bulimia – binge-eating large amounts of food and purging it to avoid weight gain.

“I couldn’t handle being starving, so I cracked and ate too much,” Tratnik said. “Being afraid to gain weight, it was a circle I couldn’t escape from.”

Cédrine Kerbaol, a professional cyclist and nutritionist, said during this year’s Tour de France Femmes that the sport is at a “dangerous time” when it comes to thinness and weight loss.

“These recent years, it has been very fashionable to count every gram on our plates,” she told 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, meanwhile, 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 combination of factors which make elite cyclists more susceptible to eating disorders and disordered eating, including riders not wanting to show weakness and facing pressure from coaches and team managers.

Pooley, who was crowned world time trial champion in 2010 and won an Olympic silver medal in 2008, has first-hand exposure to what she calls “unscientific kind of bullying” around food from team officials.

She points to one instance when, after winning a race in Montreal, she was reprimanded for ordering a hot chocolate.

“What I did experience was teams with directors who watched what you ate,” says Pooley. “So with no kind of measure and no science behind it, they just kind of watched you balefully and got cross with you if you ate the wrong thing.

“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 adds. “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 cycling is a “weight-sensitive sport” is “very engrained from the elite level down,” often triggering patterns of unhealthy behaviors in riders.

That is even filtered through the language used by those in management positions.

“Coaches have a responsibility that when they’re coaching, what are they focusing on?” Hardwicke tells CNN 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 cycling, Hardwicke adds, “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 is not just on their bodies, but also on their mental 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 CNN Sports, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), cycling’s global governing body, referred to a previous statement on REDs syndrome, which said: “The UCI’s role is to raise awareness of the health risks associated with uncontrolled weight loss, and to support doctors with resources to facilitate their work in clinical practice.

“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 cycling has “changed a lot” since she initially retired in 2014, with the most successful teams “encouraging riders to eat better and eat more.”

Today, she firmly believes that food and sport form a natural partnership – “the more you train, the more you have to eat,” adds Pooley – and has made strong, mental connections between moments in her cycling career and things she ate at the time.

That affiliation is partly why the 43-year-old decided to publish “Oat to Joy,” which is part recipe book inspired by the humbleness and versatility of oats, part autobiography chronicling food-based memories from her cycling career.

“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 competitive cycling days behind her, Pooley has now returned to her first love: running. She competes in trail events, twice finishing 11th in world championship races, and usually only cycles for fun.

And whenever she is tempted to head out on her bike, Pooley will always be sure to make “even more cafe stops than before” – a luxury her professional career didn’t always afford.

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