By Robin Chotzinoff
When he was a teenager, Shaun Riebl dreamed of turning pro. He raced with a hometown team on Long Island and closely followed his idols, tracking every twist and turn of their European tours. Though he couldn't afford expensive gear or coaching, he figured he'd emulate the pros whenever possible. Magazine stories at the time described the way Lance Armstrong weighed and measured his food. Jan Ullrich's inability to vanquish Armstrong at the Tour de France was frequently attributed to the weight he'd gained during the off-season.
After absorbing these lessons, Riebl put himself on a restricted diet, lost weight and found that being lighter made him considerably faster up the hills. "As the mantra goes," he says, "you train like a horse and eat like a rabbit." The equation clicked: Less weight equals more speed. But this bit of math led not to Grand Tour glory, but to full-blown anorexia.
Riebl, now 28 and fully recovered, continues to ride, but not the way he once imagined. "There's nothing like going out for a long ride, climbing some hills, or just mellowing around on my bike," he says. "I don't want cycling to come off as something that causes eating disorders." All the same, as part of his master's degree in exercise science, Riebl studied the connection between male cyclists and eating-disordered behavior, and wasn't surprised by what he learned.
According to the paper he published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 20 percent of the cyclists studied showed signs of abnormal eating behaviors. But fewer than half of those men grasped that the way they ate—or didn't—could be called a disorder. Now a renal dietitian who does sports-nutrition consulting on the side, Riebl is increasingly concerned for clients who believe that the desire to win, at any level, justifies unrealistic and unsustainable thinness.
The possibility that a man could be anorexic or bulimic—two syndromes long seen as endemic to females—entered the mainstream only about five years ago. Researchers say the number of men seeking treatment has suddenly exploded, though their actual figures vary. "In the past five years, we've seen more than twice as many men," reports Theodore Weltzin, MD, who directs the country's only residential treatment program for men, at Rogers Memorial Hospital, in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. He attributes some of the upswing to the proliferation of idealized male images—an abdominal six-pack on every half-naked spokesmodel. Pro athletes may succumb to the additional pressure involved with making their livings with their bodies, Weltzin says. "Cyclists are right up there with gymnasts," he says. "Always looking at how they perform based on the power-to-weight ratio."
That was Saul Raisin's concern when he started racing. At 5-foot- 10 and 180 pounds, he was nothing like "the older, faster guys who looked like their legs were chiseled from stone," he remembers. "That's what I wanted. That's what we all wanted."
It didn't seem impossible. After losing 35 pounds and growing 3 inches, Raisin raced for the USPS National Espoir Team before going to Europe to ride for Credit Agricole's Division III team. But sticking to a self-imposed, no-fat, thousand-calorie diet ultimately crashed his immune system. "I was pasty and white, and every blood test showed low testosterone," Raisin says. "I cramped up during rides, I weighed myself two, three, four times a day, and I didn't believe my coaches when they told me I was anorexic." Finally, laid low by a cold that lasted two months, Raisin went home, began eating reasonably and returned to racing (until a 2006 crash ended his pro career). Now, during coaching stints at junior camps, "I see severe eating disorders," Raisin says. "Skipping meals, not eating with the team. I told one of these kids he was jeopardizing his chances of ever being a successful athlete. He didn't even hear me. He didn't understand that the body's not meant to take that much punishment."
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