BYU study says exercise may reduce motivation for food

http://news.byu.edu/archive12-sep-foodmotivation.aspx

Sept. 12, 2012

It is commonly assumed that you can “work up an appetite” with a vigorous workout. Turns out that theory may not be completely accurate – at least immediately following exercise.

New research out of BYU shows that 45 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise in the morning actually reduces a person’s motivation for food.

Professors James LeCheminant and Michael Larson measured the neural activity of 35 women while they viewed food images, both following a morning of exercise and a morning without exercise. They found their attentional response to the food pictures decreased after the brisk workout.

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The 45-minute exercise bout not only produced lower brain responses to the food images, but also resulted in an increase in total physical activity that day, regardless of body mass index.

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Interestingly, the women in the experiment did not eat more food on the exercise day to “make up” for the extra calories they burned in exercise. In fact, they ate approximately the same amount of food on the non-exercise day.