Power-to-Weight: Cycling and Body Image in a World Where Skinny Rules

Or perhaps we are so much more used to plugging our senses to the constant babble of the weight-loss industry and the fashion industry and the celebrity worship culture, that it’s a See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil reaction. Maybe male endurance athletes are largely oblivious to that babble until they discover the power-to-weight mantra, and then they are especially vulnerable since they have not spent their lifetimes building up resistance to the skinnier-is-better creed. However, even a lifetime of resistance may not be enough armor, and maybe the dangerous creed just burrows into the subconscious.

As a bike racer, I have never worried much about my weight, nor have I taken particular steps to change it. The only scale in our house is used to weigh luggage, and generally resides in a dusty corner of the closet. Until I recently saw a Chinese medicine doctor and started avoiding certain foods to improve my digestion and overall health, I never limited my diet in any way designed to reduce calories. In fact, I’ve been known in my family as something of an eating machine. I am almost never known to refuse dessert or snacks; a lack of appetite on my part is taken as an indicator of illness more reliable than a high thermometer reading. When I was staying with my folks during spring training this year, my mom was in line at the supermarket with a huge load of food. The little old lady behind her said, “My, you must only come here once in a blue moon!” “Actually,” my mother replied, “I have to come here a few times a week.” “Well,” returned the old lady, “I guess you have a very big family.” “Really,” said my mom, “it’s just one daughter at home right now.”

So, I was tricked into thinking that I must have a very enlightened attitude towards weight: a very modern and healthy body image. I was not going to be one of those women who see fashion models as ideals to strive for; I was not going to be one of those athletes who endanger their health by pushing to an extreme low in body fat. I was not going to refuse cookies, ever, if I felt like eating them! I was happy, even self-congratulatory, that I’d escaped the pernicious influences of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the fashion industry in promoting skinny as better. Of course, the fact may not have escaped you that I am, in fact, a skinny bike racer, and it is generally much easier to ignore pernicious messages to get thin when you are already thin.

Even if I don’t weigh myself daily, weekly, or monthly; even if I eat whatever the heck I feel like at any hour of the day or night; even if I am in no way trying to lose weight, I definitely notice that the effect of all the training I’m doing is making me a little leaner every year. I’m not sure at all that being skinnier is making me faster on the bike. And yet, in my heart of hearts, I have to admit a terrible and embarrassing truth. In a private and perverted little way, I am happy to be thinner. And this really disturbs me.

I really thought I’d successfully knocked that sexist, objectivist “Thin Is Better” nonsense out of that part of my consciousness where I file things I believe to be true.