There's a moment in my conversation with Benji Naesen on the Roadman Cycling Podcast where he says something most cycling guests don't say out loud.
"I didn't realise when I was overweight how bad it was. Because you get so used to the lifestyle that you're living, it becomes the baseline and you forget that it's not okay for that to be the baseline."
That sentence isn't really about weight. It's about how all gradual changes work — physical, mental, behavioural. The drift happens slowly enough that you don't notice the new normal. By the time you do, the gap between where you are and where you'd like to be is so large that the fix looks impossible.
Benji's story is two stories running in parallel. One is about losing 10kg over a year. The other is about imposter syndrome — feeling like a fraud even while running one of the most respected analytical voices in cycling media. Both shifts came from the same source. Both are worth understanding properly.
Imposter syndrome, in cycling specifically
Imposter syndrome in cycling has a specific shape. It's not the generic professional version. It looks like this: you're a serious rider, you train consistently, you know more about the sport than 99% of the population — and you still feel like you don't really belong when you talk to "actual" cyclists. People with results. People with race licences. People who started young.
For Benji, the feeling was sharpened by his role. He's analysing the data of pros for an audience that includes those pros. World Tour riders message him about his analyses. He's interviewed at the Tour. And inside his head, the voice asking "what gives you the right" doesn't go quiet just because the audience has shown up.
He told me on the podcast that the fix wasn't a confidence trick or a mantra. It was experience. "The more time I spend in the industry, the more experiences I have, the more I will lose that imposter syndrome." That framing matters. The voice doesn't shut up because you talk back to it. It shuts up because you accumulate enough reps that the self-concept catches up with reality.
Translate that to amateur cycling. The rider who feels like a fraud at the club ride doesn't fix it by pretending. They fix it by showing up to the club ride 50 times. The rider who feels like a fraud at the start line of their first sportive doesn't fix it by reading more books. They fix it by riding the sportive, then the next one, then the next one. The frame of reference rebuilds itself with each rep.
This is one of the structural reasons community matters so much. Riders who train alone accumulate reps in isolation, with no external corrective. Riders who plug into a serious community accumulate reps in context — they see the standard, they meet the people, they realise the gap between themselves and "real cyclists" is mostly a story they were telling themselves. The story dies because the experience makes it untrue.
The 10kg story, properly
Benji's weight story is one most riders will recognise. It started young. He had a healthy childhood — football, neighbourhood games, active outside. Around age 13, his dad's medical scare turned the family upside down. The lifestyle shifted. So did his eating. The weight came on gradually, then settled into a baseline. By the time he was an adult running a cycling channel, he was 10kg over what he should have been carrying.
The catalyst, as he describes it, came in November 2021. Three things converged. Personal confidence — he'd started to want to show his face on camera and didn't feel ready. Health markers — acid reflux and other symptoms that suggested the body was telling him something. Professional alignment — he was making content about cyclists while not really being one himself, and the inconsistency had started to bother him.
He didn't pick a crash diet. He didn't book a six-week intensive. He picked a tempo: 10kg over the next year. "I knew like maybe if I try to lose 10 kilos in the next year, I feel like that's a very healthy tempo, it's not outrageous, and I feel like it's manageable to be able to do it time-wise with the other stuff that I've got going on in my life."
That sentence is the entire mechanism. Manageable to do alongside everything else. Not a separate project. A small structural change to the daily framework, sustained for long enough that 10kg accumulated into a different person.
Why slow works and fast doesn't
The cycling internet is full of fast-loss programs. Calorie-tracking apps. Aggressive deficits. Race-weight protocols promising large drops in short time-frames. The data on what these actually produce is consistent. Most riders who lose weight quickly regain it within 18 months. The body fights aggressive deficits with hormonal signals — cortisol up, leptin down, hunger ramped up, metabolic rate adjusted down — that make sustained deficit increasingly hard to hold.
A slower tempo bypasses most of this. A 0.5 to 1kg per month deficit doesn't trigger the same defence response. The body adjusts gradually. The new behaviours have time to harden into routine. By the time the year is up, what was deliberate effort at the start has become baseline behaviour at the end. The weight stays off because the framework that produced it stays in place.
For cyclists specifically, the slow approach has a second advantage. Aggressive deficits cost you watts. Power-to-weight is a ratio with two terms. If you drop 4kg in eight weeks but lose 25 watts of FTP, your climbing has gone backwards. A slower approach holds power output steady, or even gains it, while the weight comes down. The ratio improves more than the scale alone suggests.
This is the version of weight loss that body composition for cyclists lays out in detail. The principles aren't different from what Benji did, even though his goal wasn't strictly performance. He wanted a sustainable change. A slow tempo, paired with consistent execution, produced one.
The accountability structure
The piece of Benji's story I want to highlight is the one that gets underdiscussed. He didn't do it alone.
He had Matt Lane — a fellow YouTuber — supporting the mindset side. He had the public commitment of having put a video out about the weight. He had the daily structure of a job that depended on him being able to show up on camera. The accountability didn't replace the discipline. It supported it.
This is what most amateurs miss. Self-coaching, self-imposed accountability, "doing it on your own" — these are framed as more virtuous than working with structure. The data says the opposite. People who change their behaviour successfully almost always have external scaffolding. A coach. A training partner. A public commitment. A community. Something outside themselves that catches them when motivation drops.
The activation energy for skipping a session changes dramatically when someone else is going to notice. The activation energy for eating well at dinner changes dramatically when you've told someone what your plan is. None of this is moral. It's structural. The brain that lives alone with its decisions skips more decisions than the brain that lives in a community of accountability.
The Not Done Yet community is built on this. Riders post sessions, get feedback, share results, hold each other to the program. The riders who close their gap aren't the ones with more willpower. They are the ones who built the structure that means willpower isn't the variable.
Personality-driven media and what it tells us
There's a second thread in Benji's story that's worth pulling on. He's part of a generation of cycling media that's outperforming legacy outlets. Lanterne Rouge has more analytical depth than most magazines. The audience doesn't come for the brand — they come for him, his co-host, the way they see the sport.
This matters because it points at a broader truth about how trust works now. Audiences trust people, not institutions. They follow individuals whose decisions they can see, whose work they can audit, whose voice they can recognise. The cycling industry didn't predict this and is mostly still adjusting.
For amateurs, the practical takeaway is about who to listen to. The trustworthy sources are the ones whose data is open, whose biases are visible, and whose mistakes are part of the public record. That's a different filter than "is this from a major publication." Some of the best cycling analysis being produced right now is on YouTube channels and podcasts run by individuals. Some of the worst is on platforms with significant resources. The format isn't the signal — the work is.
That principle is also why this site looks the way it does. The editorial standards page lays out exactly how content gets fact-checked, what we cite, and how disputes get handled. The trust is built by being auditable, not by being institutional.
What to take from this
Three lessons that apply directly:
Tempo matters more than effort. A 10kg drop over a year is sustainable. A 10kg drop over two months is brittle. The same applies to FTP gains, training-load increases, habit changes. The slower path almost always finishes ahead because it doesn't trigger the defences that fast paths do.
Imposter syndrome dies through reps, not affirmations. If you feel like you don't belong on the bike, in the club, at the start line — the answer is to put yourself in those situations more often, not to talk yourself into being okay with them from a distance. Each rep recalibrates the self-concept by a small amount. Fifty reps and the story has changed.
Build the accountability before you need it. Don't try to change behaviour through willpower alone. Find the coach, the community, the training partner, the public commitment that means skipping costs more than showing up. The scaffolding does most of the work.
If Benji's story landed for you and you want to hear the full conversation — including how he got into cycling, what he learns from his audience, and where Lanterne Rouge goes next — the full episode is on the feed. And if any of this is hitting close to home for your own situation — weight that's drifted, motivation that's flat, the sense that you should be further than you are — Roadman coaching is built around exactly this. Not a 30-day program. A year-long partnership where the work compounds.
The new baseline takes a year to set. Start now.