Most cyclists chasing race weight are eating less and getting slower. You train 8 to 12 hours a week. The scale moves a kilo, then it moves back. The wattage on the climbs is not budging. The legs feel heavy on Wednesday for no reason you can name.
There is a reason. We have the equation upside down.
That is the line from Dr David Dunne, the performance nutritionist behind the fuelling at INEOS Grenadiers, EF Education–EasyPost, Uno-X Mobility and Q36.5, and the founder of Hexus — the platform that has quietly made its way onto more World Tour team buses than anyone outside the sport realises. He came on the podcast for nearly two hours. The headline he gave us — "we got weight loss wrong" — is the position he holds across an entire WorldTour client list.
Listen to the full conversation on the Roadman Cycling Podcast →
The 3 to 7 Kilo Problem Nobody Is Solving
Walk up to any club ride start line in the country. Most riders training 8 to 12 hours a week are 3 to 7 kilos heavier than they would like to be. Cat 3, Cat 4, sportif. Sometimes Cat 2. That gap is not what you would expect from a serious amateur putting in 500 hours a year.
The default explanation is "you are eating too much." Dunne does not buy it. The pattern he sees is the opposite — riders who are under-fuelling at the wrong end of the day, then over-eating in the evening when willpower has run out, then feeling sluggish on Tuesday's intervals because Monday was a rest day done in deficit on top of a Sunday already done in deficit. That is not a calorie surplus problem. It is a periodisation problem dressed up as one.
His framing is sharp. Nutrition is not a separate thing you do. As he put it on the episode: "Nutrition is a training tool. It is fundamentally there to enhance your performance. What you eat before, during, and after exercise can amplify how your body responds or completely dampen if you get it wrong."
If you have ever felt like you are training hard, eating "well" by tracking-app standards, and getting nowhere — this is almost certainly where the leak is.
The Carb Numbers Are Not For You
Here is the bit the cycling internet has badly mishandled in the last three seasons. World Tour fuelling is now sitting at 90 to 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour, with some riders trained up to 140. That is real. It is also not your number.
Those targets are calibrated for someone holding 300+ watts on average for five-hour stages. Average. For five hours. The energy cost is so high the only way to keep up with it is to push fuelling at the upper end of what the gut can absorb.
If you are riding three hours on Sunday at an average of 180 watts, your absolute energy expenditure is a fraction of that. Putting 100 grams of carbohydrate per hour into your system to "fuel like the pros" creates exactly the surplus you spent the rest of the week trying to avoid. That is why the kilos do not budge.
Dunne's point is that the right starting place is your own kilojoules, not the headline number from a Tour de France article. Most amateur cyclists run a gross metabolic efficiency of around 21%. Pro riders sit slightly higher. So the kilojoules on your head unit at the end of a ride are roughly the calorie cost — pretty close, give or take. Match in-ride fuelling to that, not to the WorldTour headline. The Roadman in-ride fuelling calculator does the maths for you.
This is not an argument against fuelling rides. It is an argument against fuelling them like you are racing the Giro when you are not.
The Shadow Problem: Low Energy Availability
The darker side of "lighter is faster" is the one most amateurs do not see coming.
Low Energy Availability — LEA — is what happens when total energy intake drops below roughly 30 kcal per kilogram of fat-free mass per day, sustained over weeks or months. The IOC consensus statement on RED-S is the reference here, and it is not a niche concern. Dunne sees it across the amateur population, especially in riders chasing race weight on top of a stressful job and broken sleep.
The body's response is exactly what you would expect from an evolutionarily smart system: it conserves. Hormones drop. Recovery slows. The immune system gets sloppy. In female athletes, the menstrual cycle disappears — which is the body saying, in plain language, "I do not have enough energy to spare for this." In male athletes, testosterone falls, sleep degrades, niggling injuries become full ones, and the rider gets slower while convincing themselves they are getting fitter.
The reason this is hard to spot is that it does not look like "starvation." It looks like stagnation. Your numbers stop progressing. You catch the cold going around the office. Your motivation tanks. You blame the plan. The plan is not the problem. You are.
The Roadman energy availability calculator is the cleanest way to check this on yourself. If you are running long blocks below 30 kcal/kg fat-free mass and wondering why training is not landing, you have your answer.
Body Composition Is The Right Question
Here is the conceptual flip that matters most for any rider listening.
Total mass on the bathroom scale is not the variable. Fat versus lean tissue is. Two riders at 75 kilos can have wildly different power outputs because one has built lean mass under fuelled training and the other has lost lean mass under restriction. The bathroom scale cannot tell you the difference. The clock at the end of the climb can.
Dunne sees this play out at the WorldTour level constantly. Riders bring forward an "ideal weight" from when they were 20 — when they were lighter because they were less developed, not because they were better. Eight years of professional training later, they chase that old number, get there, and find themselves slower. They cannot work out why.
This applies directly to the comeback rider listening. If you raced at 68 kilos in your early twenties and you are 80 now, the goal is not 68. The goal is to find your race weight in the body you have today. That number lives somewhere between your two bathroom-scale extremes, and the only way to find it is to set up the process and look for the clues.
For the broader picture on what your number should look like, our power-to-weight ratio guide, aero versus weight breakdown and the Roadman race weight calculator cover the territory.
How To Actually Run The Deficit
If you genuinely do need to lose body fat, the move is not "eat 1,800 calories a day until something changes."
The move is a 10 to 15% daily deficit — roughly 300 to 500 calories under your real expenditure — pushed into the right windows. That number is small enough to protect adaptation and large enough to shift body composition over months. Anything deeper starts cannibalising the work.
The windows matter as much as the size. Build your nutrition around your training, not the other way round. Hard sessions get fuelled. Race-pace efforts get fuelled. Long endurance days get fuelled. The deficit goes into easy aerobic days, recovery days and full rest days — windows where your body can tolerate the slight gap without compromising the adaptation.
This is what "periodised nutrition" actually means in practice. As Dunne said on the episode: "Today, you could go out for a 4-hour ride. Your on-bike energy expenditure could be 2,000 calories. Tomorrow, you could be at a day of complete rest. So you need to start to understand that your fueling should adjust and your overall nutrition plan and structure should adjust day by day and meal by meal."
If your training is already structured in TrainingPeaks, the planned data is doing most of the work for you — every session has a duration and intensity attached. From there, the per-meal call is straightforward. Big training day tomorrow, evening dinner is bigger. Rest day on Monday, dinner is smaller. Stop thinking in calendar days. Start thinking in 72-hour windows.
Floor Over Ceiling
The closing thread of the conversation matters more than the macro numbers.
Most cyclists chase the ceiling — the perfect block, the perfect race-week protocol, the camp in Spain. Dunne's argument, and one we keep coming back to on the podcast, is that the floor is the lever that moves your year. What you do on a wet Tuesday after work, on a deadline-week Wednesday, on a Sunday after a bad night's sleep — that is the data set that determines where your fitness ends up in August.
The mechanism for raising the floor is identity, not willpower. Pick the smallest version of the right behaviour you can do on your worst day of the week. Lay your kit out the night before. Pre-pack your bottles. Have a real breakfast in the fridge for tomorrow morning. Eat 25 to 30 grams of protein in your post-ride meal even when you cannot face cooking. Each of those is a vote, in James Clear's framing, for the rider you are becoming. Cast enough of them and the body composition follows. The fitness follows. The race weight finds itself.
The tactical fixable part — the deficit window, the in-ride grams, the protein distribution, the rest-day rules — is downstream of the identity decision. Get that right and the rest gets easier.
Listen To The Full Conversation
The full episode with Dr David Dunne is on the podcast and on YouTube. It is one of the most useful nutrition conversations we have published this year.
If you want more of the fuelling side, Alan Murchison on the Michelin chef's rules for cyclists and our in-ride nutrition guide are the natural next reads. The Healy companion piece on the tactical reset behind his Tour stage win covers what he changed about his own race weight in 2025 — same lesson, World Tour scale.
Nutrition is one of the five pillars inside NDY coaching at Roadman. If you would rather have someone build the periodisation around you, that is where to start. For a specific question, ask the Roadman AI coach — it is trained on every conversation we have had with Dunne, Murchison, Lorang, Seiler and the rest.