You weighed yourself this morning. Four kilos heavier than the spring you raced your fastest. The plan, again, is to drop them before the first sportive of the season. The plan, again, is to cut. Skip the post-ride pasta. Stop fuelling rides over two hours. Stay strict from Monday through Friday, then write off Saturday because some of the lads are going for pints anyway.
You have been here before. You will be here again next year if nothing changes.
Hannah Grant has watched a different version of this conversation play out in World Tour kitchens since 2011. She has cooked for Liquigas, Saxo-Tinkoff, and a long list of teams that have flown her around the season. She is Dr Stacy Sims's long-time collaborator. She has interviewed retired pros, current pros, and the directors who used to run them on starvation diets. She has watched the entire model pro cycling once ran on quietly collapse.
The episode she joined Anthony for on the Roadman Cycling Podcast — Omerta Busted: How Pro Cyclists Lose Weight Fast — is not the bro-fitness fast-loss content the title might suggest. It is a quiet, technical demolition of the assumptions amateur cyclists are still using to cut weight in 2026. The amateur model copies pro cycling's worst era and ignores its current playbook.
Listen to the full conversation with Hannah Grant →
The Five To Ten Kilos Hiding In The Club Bunch
Grant's headline observation, said early and without softening, is that the typical club rider is carrying five to ten kilos more than they need to be. That is not a moral judgement. It is a description of the gap between the rider in front of her at a cycling event and the same rider's realistic, sustainable race weight.
The framing matters. She is not describing a five to ten kilo starvation problem. She is describing a five to ten kilo lifestyle problem.
The same rider, on a sensible real-food diet, with the alcohol pruned back, with proper on-bike fuelling, with a relationship to food that is not punishment-based, would arrive at most of those kilos without ever attempting a "diet." The weight is not stuck because the rider lacks willpower. It is stuck because every time they try to cut, they cut the wrong thing first.
This is the sentence around which the rest of her advice rotates. The amateur weight problem is rarely a calorie problem. It is almost always a sequencing problem — the rider is restricting in the wrong place and overcompensating in another.
For the deeper version of this conversation, see Anthony's own piece on eating more to lose weight, and our companion piece on Dr David Dunne's World Tour weight loss work.
"Tell Me About Your Alcohol Intake"
The first question Grant asks any rider asking her about performance is unromantic. It is not about macros. It is not about sleep. It is not about the latest exogenous supplement.
It is about alcohol.
Her view is consistent across the conversation. Alcohol is the first thing that needs to go before any meaningful conversation about ketones, marginal gains, or refined macros. There are several reasons stacked on top of each other. It is calorically expensive in a way that quietly erases the deficit you are trying to create elsewhere. It disrupts sleep architecture — see our sleep optimisation guide — by suppressing REM and shortening total deep sleep. It impairs muscle protein synthesis, which means the strength work and the hard sessions are not banking the adaptation you paid for. It dehydrates. And — most underrated of all — it tends to come paired with food choices in the same window that you would not make sober.
She is not asking riders to be teetotal. The line she lands on is realistic. Beers on the weekend, a glass of wine with dinner, the celebration round after a target event — none of that breaks a rider's season. The grind that breaks the season is the unconscious midweek pour. The Friday night three-pint default. The "I trained well today, I deserve it" reward loop that runs on autopilot.
Most amateurs trying to find a marginal gain in ketones or beetroot juice are walking past a non-marginal one in their fridge.
This is the line Anthony hits Grant with in the episode and they both agree on it instantly. World Tour riders absolutely are digging for one-percent gains. That is their job. Amateur cyclists are usually leaving five and ten percent gains on the table while they shop for one.
The Era Pro Cycling Just Buried
The most important context Grant provides is historical. To understand why the amateur weight-loss model is so broken, you have to understand which version of pro cycling it is copying.
The model most amateurs are still running is the US Postal era. Five to seven hour rides built around the goal of arriving home empty. Riders who would, in Grant's retelling of conversations with Christian Vande Velde, stumble home barely able to walk up stairs in their own house. Eating "enough" was an aesthetic of avoidance — barely any food on the bike, a chronic energy deficit, the assumption you could train your body to "run on body fat" by repeatedly hammering it into depletion.
That model has been buried. Grant is direct about it. Modern pros eat far more on the bike — 60 to 120 grams of carbs per hour — than the US Postal generation ever did. The teams now travel with multiple chefs. Eight chefs at some squads. Dedicated kitchens. Real-time fuelling protocols built around actual carbohydrate oxidation rates and not folk wisdom about "burning fat."
The shift, in her framing, is from minimisation to optimisation. The question stopped being "how little can I get away with" and started being "how much can I absorb."
That second question is the one amateurs need to be asking. The answer is almost always a much larger number than the rider is currently delivering on the bike, which is why so many club riders end the long Saturday ride starving, demolish a takeaway, and undo three days of careful eating in a single Sunday afternoon. The fix is not more discipline at the table. The fix is more food on the bike.
If you have not seen the data on this, our carbohydrate per hour for cyclists guide and the in-ride nutrition guide walk through the modern numbers and the absorption training that supports them.
What Every Retired Pro Tells Her
There is a moment in the conversation Anthony pushes Grant on twice because it is so unanimous it sounds suspicious. She has interviewed a long list of retired pros over the years and asked all of them the same question — what advice would you pass on to amateur cyclists.
The answer is always some version of: chill out.
Grant is honest about why this answer is so consistent. The pros watch amateur cyclists pile a quasi-professional training schedule and a pro-mimicking diet on top of a full-time job, a marriage, kids, and a social life — and they see, with the clarity of distance, that the equation does not balance. The level of restriction the amateur applies, against the volume of life the amateur is also carrying, generates a stress load that destroys performance from the other side.
There is real research underwriting the line. Chronic stress elevates cortisol, suppresses recovery, disrupts sleep, and undermines the same adaptations the strict diet plan was meant to drive. The cyclist running the "almost-pro" lifestyle on top of a full-time job is, in physiological terms, running a worse training programme than the cyclist who eats normally, sleeps a full night, and races for fun.
The retired pros are not telling amateurs to stop training. They are telling amateurs to stop simulating professional cycling without the rest of the professional support stack. The pros had chefs, sports scientists, masseurs, full sleep schedules, and no day job. The amateur trying to apply the same diet plan with none of those supports is asking the same body to absorb the same restriction with a fraction of the recovery resources.
The honest version of "chill out" is "respect the difference between your situation and a Tour de France rider's situation."
For the structural version of this conversation — what an amateur season actually looks like when calibrated to real life — see our time-crunched cyclist piece and cutting training in half breakdown.
Real Food First. Everything Else Second.
When Anthony pushes Grant on supplements — exogenous ketones, the various proprietary fuels currently flying around pro cycling — her position is unambiguous and a little weary. Real food first. Always.
She is not anti-supplement. She is anti-sequencing-error. The amateur cyclist who has not yet sorted alcohol intake, sleep, on-bike fuelling, and the basic relationship with food is not in the position to extract value from a 1 percent intervention. The marginal gains amplify a good base. They do not rescue a poor one.
The cycling internet, in her view, has been seduced by the technical conversations that make pro cycling look exotic. Ketones. Specific carbohydrate ratios. Tailored gut training. All of it is real and all of it is operating at the top end of a stack that begins with the rider eating actual food, sleeping actual hours, and not destroying their adaptation cycle every weekend with alcohol.
The order of operations she lands on is simple.
First. Real food, real meals, eaten with people you live with. Vegetables, complex carbs, protein at every meal, fats not feared. Fuel the rides, recover with food you'd serve a non-cyclist.
Second. Alcohol audited honestly. Cut to actual social occasions. Stop the unconscious pours.
Third. On-bike fuelling brought up to modern numbers. 60 to 90 grams of carbs per hour for most amateurs, depending on intensity and gut training. Stop trying to lose weight on the bike.
Fourth. Sleep, stress, and the relationship with food itself. If eating has become punishment, that is the bigger problem than any macro.
Then, if you want to, supplements at the margin. Beetroot juice. Caffeine. Ketones. Whatever the current frontier is. They will deliver real but small upside on top of the real big upside the first four steps gave you.
The amateur who runs the order in reverse spends a lot of money on supplements that do nothing because the foundation underneath them is too unstable to let them work.
The Relationship Trap
The most quietly important moment in the episode is the one Grant returns to twice. The worst thing a cyclist can develop is a punishment relationship with food.
She has watched it inside teams. Riders who treated eating as a thing they had to win at. Days where they had ridden well and could "earn" food. Days where they had not ridden well and "needed" to cut. Eating disorders inside the sport — historical and ongoing — built off exactly this dynamic. She is not subtle about the consequences.
The amateur version is less catastrophic but the structure is the same. The rider who counts every calorie on Tuesday so they can feel "good" about the deficit on Wednesday is on the same psychological architecture as the pro who weighed every gram of pasta with shame attached. The relationship is the problem, not the food.
The cyclists Grant respects most are the ones who have varied across a season, eaten with their families, gone on holiday, allowed the off weeks, and still arrived at race weight when it mattered. The cyclists who white-knuckle the calendar all year round burn out, develop disordered relationships with eating, or quietly leave the sport altogether by their mid-forties.
Anthony makes the same point with his own evolution. He raced full-time, chased contracts to France and the United States, hit a level he was not going to break through, took years off, and came back to Cat 1 with a totally different attitude. Beers on the weekends. Picking races based on the weather. Going to ride mountain bikes with his girlfriend instead of pinning numbers on if the morning did not feel right. The performance gains, in his telling, came from finding that balance, not from forcing harder against it.
Where This Leaves The Amateur Cyclist
The honest takeaway from Hannah Grant's conversation is the one most amateur cyclists do not want to hear. The path to a sustainable race weight is not more restriction. It is better sequencing.
Audit alcohol first. Fuel the bike properly. Eat real food at real meals. Sleep. Repair the relationship with food before the macro spreadsheet. Treat marginal-gains supplements as the topping, not the meal.
The omerta the episode title refers to is the silence around how pro cyclists actually lose weight in the modern era. The truth is it does not look like the amateur version. It does not involve depletion rides. It does not involve skipping carbs. It does not involve treating eating as a moral test. It involves a chef who knows what they are doing, fuelling that has tripled in the last fifteen years, and a culture that has — finally — stopped confusing suffering with seriousness.
The amateur version of that pro playbook is not unattainable. It is just unfashionable. Real food. No nonsense. The five to ten kilos arrive on their own when the sequencing is right and the lifestyle is sustainable.
If you want help calibrating that sequencing to your own season — fuelling, body composition, race weight strategy — start with the Roadman coaching system. For a faster answer on a specific question grounded in this conversation, ask the AI coach.
Listen To The Full Conversation
The full episode with Hannah Grant — including the kitchen-side stories from the US Postal era, the modern fuelling protocols, and the supplement conversation — is on the Roadman Cycling Podcast. For the broader nutrition picture, see Dr David Dunne on weight loss myths and the World Tour fuelling reset.
The omerta on pro cycling weight loss is over. The question is whether the amateur version follows the modern playbook or stays trapped in 2003.