"Training camps felt like a competition of who could lose the most weight" - Professional speaks on eating disorders in male peloton

Nutrition is crucial in cycling - it's one of the key pillars that supports performance, recovery, and overall health. Whether you're a competitive cyclist or a casual rider, how you fuel your body directly affects how well you ride. And it's not different up in the highest league of cycling - in fact perhaps even more extreme. In an anonymous letter to Domestique, a professional male cyclist provides unique view into how the "unhealthy culture" around eating nearly ruined his career.

"I grew up with cycling in my blood," he begins the story. "My family watched the Tour de France together every summer, and when I was seven years old, I stood by the roadside and watched the peloton fly past. From that moment on, I knew this was what I wanted to do with my life: become a professional cyclist."

"As I progressed in the sport, I quickly learned that in men’s cycling you had to be as light as possible. Many of the riders around me were extremely thin, and I accepted early on that this was part of the job. Once I joined the WorldTour peloton, that mindset became even more ingrained."

The cyclist admits at one point he found himself "obsessed" with the tiniest details of nutritioning. "I started tracking and weighing all my food, cutting out anything that wasn’t considered 'pure fuel.' A burger, for example, wasn’t just food, it was failure, and not something I could eat unless there was a good reason or it was the off-season."

The more time he spent at the professional level, the anonymous cyclist discovered how toxic can the environment of highest level of cycling be towards the riders.

"It wasn’t only about nutrition. At altitude camps and within teams, it almost felt like a competition: who could lose the most weight. Teammates would joke about body fat, staff would reinforce the pressure, and the culture normalised disordered eating as discipline. What began as something staff and nutritionists called dedication eventually turned into obsession. I couldn’t live without my scale, and going out for dinner felt impossible because it would 'ruin' all my progress."

The long months and years of "cyclist diet" eventually caught up with the rider's health and instead of flying up the mountains, he suddenly could not race at all as he became too vulnerable to illness and injuries.

"I reached a point of being under-fuelled for so long that I couldn’t train properly. My body felt broken. I couldn’t train or recover, I was constantly sick or injured, and mentally I was crumbling. In men’s cycling, we don’t have the same visible 'red flags' that women do, like the loss of menstruation, so it often gets ignored or dismissed."

"Eventually, I had to face the fact that I couldn’t continue like this. Over several years, I worked, often in secret, to rebuild my relationship with food and with my body. It wasn’t easy. Gaining weight in an environment that celebrates thinness is incredibly difficult, and I had to learn to tune out the comments and the doubts."

"But the result was that, for the first time in my career, I completed a season without missing races due to illness, injury, or burnout. Fueling properly hasn’t made me weaker, it has made me reliable, resilient, and happier, both on and off the bike."

Finally, the professional urges for eating disorders in men's peloton to be spoken about more openly, instead of just viewing it as a "part of the sport". Without a sustainable approach to sport, it might become difficult to maintain cycling as it is now.