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.
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