Benji Naesen runs one of the fastest-growing cycling podcasts in the world. He's been on most major TV channels covering the sport. He sat across from me and said he still feels like an outsider, still feels like the imposter, still feels like the gaming kid who shouldn't be commenting on professional racing.
He also lost 10kg in the year before we recorded. Not through a strict diet. Through a deliberately tolerant approach to consistency that survived the inevitable bad days. The two stories are related — both are about how he handles the gap between who he is and who he could become — and both translate directly into what most amateur cyclists are wrestling with quietly.
This is what he said.
The 10kg story isn't a transformation story
The cleanest part of the conversation. Most weight-loss content sells transformation — strict identity shift, hard rules, before-and-after photos. Naesen explicitly avoided that.
His mindset, in his own words: "I didn't expect to lose 10kg in a day. I knew that changing your lifestyle isn't something that goes in like one go. It's something you need to build consistency on. If I had a day where I'm over my calories — it's not the end of the world. Just do better tomorrow."
That tolerance built in is the part. Strict diets — including most identity-led ones — break the moment a single bad day happens, because the rider then identifies as "having failed" and the whole structure collapses. Naesen's looser framing meant that a bad day was just a bad day. Tomorrow's plan was unchanged. The lifetime average kept improving because he didn't blow up the plan after every wobble.
This is the same dynamic Anthony has talked about for years. The riders who lose meaningful weight and keep it off don't operate on willpower spikes. They operate on tolerance for imperfection inside a stable structure. We laid out the full version in the 9kg-while-eating-more breakdown and the five fixable reasons cyclists can't lose weight episode.
The technical bits Benji used: rough calorie awareness rather than strict tracking, accountability calls with another creator, and a one-year horizon rather than a 12-week sprint. Nothing exotic. The quiet detail people miss — he had context for why he wanted to do it that wasn't vanity. His dad spent most of his life carrying significant weight and dealt with the consequences. Benji wanted his late-30s self to look back at his late-20s self and not see a wasted decade.
That motivation framing matters. Vanity is a fragile fuel. Identity that connects to family, mortality, who you want to be in twenty years — that's the fuel that survives bad weeks.
"Do you feel like a fraud?"
The bit of the conversation I didn't expect to land where it did.
I asked Benji whether, despite the platform, the audience, the TV appearances, he ever felt like a fraud. He said yes. Often. He'd come into cycling through Pro Cycling Manager, a video game. He'd built a YouTube channel out of that interest. He'd started the podcast. He'd ended up on professional broadcasts. And he still, regularly, felt like he didn't belong.
His framing of why it fades: "The more time I spend in the industry, the more experiences I have, the more I will lose that imposter syndrome." Not credentials. Not a degree in sports science. Not a professional racing career. Reps. Accumulated time inside the conversation, watching the conversation, contributing to the conversation.
This is the structure imposter syndrome actually responds to. Most amateur cyclists experience some version of this every week. The Tuesday chaingang where everyone seems to know more than you. The race where the kit is sharper and the chat is faster. The coffee stop where someone references a workout type you've never heard of and you nod along.
The instinct is to fix it by reading more, certifying more, learning more. That mostly doesn't work. What works is staying in the room for long enough that the room becomes familiar. The feeling fades because exposure is the cure, and exposure only happens by showing up.
This is one of the deeper reasons we run the Not Done Yet community and the free Clubhouse the way we do. The fastest way to dissolve imposter feeling is to be in a room where everyone is honestly somewhere on the same path. The Cat 1 racer is wrestling with their version of it. The 50-year-old comeback rider is wrestling with theirs. None of them have it figured out, and recognising that is what lets the feeling stop being a private problem.
Why personality-led media is winning
The other piece of the conversation worth picking up — Benji is part of a larger shift happening in cycling media that legacy outlets aren't responding to.
Cycling Weekly, Cyclingnews, Cycling Tips (now wound down), the magazines that defined cycling coverage for decades — their audiences are eroding while podcasts run by individuals are growing. The reason isn't simply that people prefer audio. It's that audiences buy trust in a person before they buy editorial authority from a masthead.
When Benji says something about a race result, his audience is hearing it from Benji — a person whose taste, voice and history they know. When the same point appears on a legacy cycling site, it's coming from "the editorial team" — a faceless brand whose taste is unclear. The first signal carries more weight. The audience moves accordingly.
The other factor he flagged is the revenue-model trap. Legacy outlets built their economics on banner-ad clicks. That model rewards more headlines, faster, with more sensational angles. Quality of writing falls. The audience leaves. Revenue drops. The pressure to write more spammy headlines increases. The cycle continues.
Independent creators run on different economics — paid subscriptions, sponsorships, community. The economics let them prioritise quality over click frequency. They get smaller audiences with deeper engagement, which converts better, which funds better content.
The cycling world has more independent creators producing high-quality work today than at any point in the sport's history. The names Benji mentioned are part of that — Spencer Tuft's Wheel Talk, the Lanterne Rouge podcast, this show, several others. Each is small relative to the legacy outlets at peak. Together they're the new mainstream.
For cyclists who consume this stuff, the implication is straightforward: trust the human voices building patient, evidence-based work over the engagement-bait outlets that dominated the previous decade. We laid out our take in the best cycling podcasts 2026 breakdown.
The accountability lever Benji used
I want to highlight one specific tactical thing because it's borrowable.
Benji credited regular accountability calls with another creator, Matt Lane, as a key piece of why the weight loss worked. Two people on similar paths, checking in, staying honest about what was working and what wasn't.
This is one of the most underused tools in amateur cycling. Coaching is excellent and the riders inside our coaching system get a lot from it. But coaching is also a relatively expensive intervention and not the right fit for every life stage. Peer accountability is the cheaper version that captures most of the consistency benefit.
The mechanics are simple. Find one other rider chasing a comparable goal. Set a fortnightly call. Twenty minutes, no more. Each call covers what worked, what didn't, what's next. The presence of the call alone is the lever — knowing you'll have to report on the week makes the week more honest. Riders who run this for six months consistently outperform riders training in identical hours alone.
Inside the free Clubhouse we run a structured version of this — it's one of the reasons the community exists. The riders who get most from the free side aren't the ones consuming content. They're the ones who pair up with another member and check in regularly.
The harder truth under the imposter conversation
The bit Benji said that I keep coming back to.
"If I'm 50, I don't want to look back at my late 20s and realise that I didn't get the best out of that period and wasn't my best self during that period."
That sentence is the same one most of the riders who join the Not Done Yet community are quietly running in their own heads, just transposed into their forties or fifties. I don't want to look back from 60 and see a decade where I let cycling slip. I don't want my best riding to be behind me. I have more in me. I just need to do something about it.
That's not motivational fluff. That's a specific orientation that drives action when easier reasons would let it drop. The 50-year-old version of you is going to look back at the 45-year-old version. Either he sees a decade where you took it seriously and got the most out of the engine you had, or he sees a decade where you didn't. Both are real possibilities. The choice between them is being made right now in how you handle the next eight weeks of training, the next eight weeks of food, the next eight weeks of recovery.
The imposter feeling and the body-composition stall are often two faces of the same thing. Both shrink when you act. Both grow when you don't. The action doesn't have to be perfect — Benji's wasn't. It has to be consistent enough that the inevitable bad days don't end the project.
What to take into your week
Three concrete moves.
One — set a one-year body-composition target if you have one and want to take it seriously. A year, not 12 weeks. With explicit tolerance for bad days. Pair with peer accountability if at all possible. Set the actual target honestly — the Race Weight calculator gives you a sane number to work toward without crashing your hormones, and we covered the broader playbook in the body-composition breakdown. Inside the Not Done Yet community the riders who hit body-composition goals are nearly always running this exact structure.
Two — take the imposter feeling as a signal to stay in the room, not leave it. If you feel out of your depth at a club ride, that's the right club ride for you. If you feel out of your depth in a community of more experienced riders, that's the right community. The feeling fades through reps, not retreat.
Three — audit your media diet. If your information about cycling is dominated by the engagement-bait wing of the legacy press, the picture you have of the sport is distorted. Move three of your daily reads to independent voices doing patient work. The quality of your decisions about your own riding will improve in weeks, not months.
If the line that hit was "do better tomorrow," that's the only philosophy a one-year project actually needs. Not perfection. Just better tomorrow. Hold that for a year and you'll be a different rider and a different person on the other side.
The harder bit Benji didn't say out loud
There's a piece under his weight-loss story that I want to surface because it's the part most amateurs skip when they read this kind of content.
Benji's dad spent most of his life carrying significant weight and dealt with the consequences. Benji didn't talk about that as motivation in the abstract — it was a specific image he had of his future self if he didn't change his current self. The grandfather his future kids would meet. The fifty-year-old going up stairs. The version of him at sixty.
That kind of motivation — concrete, family-anchored, mortality-adjacent — is structurally different from "I want to look better in summer kit." It's harder to fake and easier to sustain because the reason for the work is connected to people you actually love rather than to an abstract aspirational image.
If your weight-loss attempts have failed repeatedly, it's worth asking honestly what your motivation is. If the honest answer is "vanity" or "I'd like to be faster on the bike," those motivations work for some people but they break for many others. The ones that hold across years almost always involve other people — family, future self, the version of you your kids will remember. The work to articulate the right motivation is one of the better-spent hours of any rebuild.
We've watched this pattern repeatedly inside the Not Done Yet community. The riders who succeed long-term aren't the ones with the cleanest plans. They're the ones whose plans are anchored to reasons that survive the bad weeks.
Find your reason that survives. Then the consistency layer Benji used — peer accountability, tolerance for off-days, the year-long horizon — does the heavy lifting.
