{"id":235629,"date":"2025-10-23T18:10:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T18:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/235629\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T18:10:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T18:10:13","slug":"former-cyclist-emma-pooley-witnessed-unscientific-bullying-around-food-amid-the-sports-high-prevalence-of-eating-disorders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/235629\/","title":{"rendered":"Former cyclist Emma Pooley witnessed \u2018unscientific bullying\u2019 around food amid the sport\u2019s high prevalence of eating disorders"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Emma Pooley may have retired from professional cycling<\/a> around a decade ago, but she believes that the effects of under-fueling \u2013 what she describes as her \u201cweird\u201d relationship with food \u2013 are still with her.\n <\/p>\n

\n Those scars, Pooley says, are \u201cpermanent\u201d and include having a bone density which is \u201c10 to 20 years older than I actually am.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n 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<\/a> with some of her best and favorite recipes; but she also recognizes how her cycling career made her develop worrying and unhealthy habits.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI sort of thought I shouldn\u2019t 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,\u201d Pooley tells CNN Sports. \u201cAnd I didn\u2019t put on weight because I was training lots.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n 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\u2019s an approach that was born out of seeing \u201creally, really skinny people\u201d around her in the peloton, as well as the false assumption that being lighter makes you a faster and better cyclist.\n <\/p>\n

\n The effects of under-eating for professional athletes, Pooley has discovered, can be dangerous and long-lasting.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cWith women, if you\u2019re underweight for a long time, you end up messing your hormones around and (can develop) low bone density,\u201d she says.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cMy bone density is lower than it should be, and I keep getting stress fractures. I run lots now \u2013 that\u2019s my main sport and I still race competitively. In the last seven years, I\u2019ve had a stress fracture in my femur and a stress fracture in my foot. I don\u2019t know if they\u2019re directly caused by years of under-fueling, but it certainly wouldn\u2019t have helped.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"Emma<\/p>\n

\n Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport<\/a> (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.\n <\/p>\n

\n Poor bone health is just one knock-on effect. Medical experts say that REDs can damage an athlete\u2019s metabolism, their immune system, their cardiovascular health, their menstrual cycle, and their mental health, as well as their athletic performance.\n <\/p>\n

\n The condition isn\u2019t limited to cycling, but under-eating has become a flashpoint in the sport in recent years. A scoping review<\/a> published in December 2022 found that competitive cycling has \u201ca high prevalence of disordered eating and\/or eating disorders,\u201d while several athletes have spoken openly about their troubled relationships with food.\n <\/p>\n

\n In an interview<\/a> with Cycling Weekly last year, Slovenian Jan Tratnik said that his desperation to lose weight led him to develop bulimia \u2013 binge-eating large amounts of food and purging it to avoid weight gain.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI couldn\u2019t handle being starving, so I cracked and ate too much,\u201d Tratnik said. \u201cBeing afraid to gain weight, it was a circle I couldn\u2019t escape from.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n C\u00e9drine Kerbaol, a professional cyclist and nutritionist, said<\/a> during this year\u2019s Tour de France Femmes that the sport is at a \u201cdangerous time\u201d when it comes to thinness and weight loss.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThese recent years, it has been very fashionable to count every gram on our plates,\u201d she told French newspaper L\u2019Humanit\u00e9. \u201cWe must not fall into a form of dehumanization and infantilization.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Former Tour de France champion and five-time Olympic champion Bradley Wiggins, meanwhile, said<\/a> in 2019 that \u201cthe focus on being light as a rider \u2026 can lead to depression, it can lead to things worse than that.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s 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.\n <\/p>\n

\"Emma<\/p>\n

\n 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 \u201cunscientific kind of bullying\u201d around food from team officials.\n <\/p>\n

\n She points to one instance when, after winning a race in Montreal, she was reprimanded for ordering a hot chocolate.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cWhat I did experience was teams with directors who watched what you ate,\u201d says Pooley. \u201cSo 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cBack 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,\u201d she adds. \u201cIt\u2019s just fuel, and you shouldn\u2019t enjoy it. If you enjoy food, you\u2019ll get fat. And that is so wrong. I really think that enjoying food is an important part of a healthy diet.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n According to Jack Hardwicke, a social scientist at Nottingham Trent University in England, the notion that cycling is a \u201cweight-sensitive sport\u201d is \u201cvery engrained from the elite level down,\u201d often triggering patterns of unhealthy behaviors in riders.\n <\/p>\n

\n That is even filtered through the language used by those in management positions.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cCoaches have a responsibility that when they\u2019re coaching, what are they focusing on?\u201d Hardwicke tells CNN Sports. \u201cHow 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\u2019s the balance?\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n In elite cycling, Hardwicke adds, \u201cteam managers might not see their athletes as humans all the time \u2013 they see them as people that they need to perform for the team to survive.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n For riders, the toll of under-eating is not just on their bodies, but also on their mental wellbeing.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cWhen you speak to people that have suffered with eating disorders and disordered eating, the mental battle is really the biggest part,\u201d says Hardwicke. \u201cIt\u2019s very closely aligned with things like body image issues, self-confidence issues \u2026 I think that\u2019s where the real issue is.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n When contacted by CNN Sports, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), cycling\u2019s global governing body, referred to a previous statement<\/a> on REDs syndrome, which said: \u201cThe UCI\u2019s 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cFor 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.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"Former<\/p>\n

\n As for Pooley, she admits that cycling has \u201cchanged a lot\u201d since she initially retired in 2014, with the most successful teams \u201cencouraging riders to eat better and eat more.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Today, she firmly believes that food and sport form a natural partnership \u2013 \u201cthe more you train, the more you have to eat,\u201d adds Pooley \u2013 and has made strong, mental connections between moments in her cycling career and things she ate at the time.\n <\/p>\n

\n That affiliation is partly why the 43-year-old decided to publish \u201cOat to Joy,\u201d which is part recipe book inspired by the humbleness and versatility of oats, part autobiography chronicling food-based memories from her cycling career.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI can exactly remember the pizza at the end of the Giro (d\u2019Italia) in 2011 after I didn\u2019t win,\u201d says Pooley. \u201cCertainly, with races, I can remember the special food that we had the dinner after. I\u2019m just really good at remembering what I ate.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n And whenever she is tempted to head out on her bike, Pooley will always be sure to make \u201ceven more cafe stops than before\u201d \u2013 a luxury her professional career didn\u2019t always afford.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Emma Pooley may have retired from professional cycling around a decade ago, but she believes that the effects…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235630,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[569],"tags":[64,63,784,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-235629","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-cycling","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}