Morning Workouts May Curb Appetites

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Just can’t find that motivation for an early morning workout? Well, how about if we told you, it could help you control your appetite for the rest of the day?

Researchers from Brigham Young University, recently took two groups of women — 18 of them were normal weight and 17 were obese — and had them walk briskly on a treadmill for 45 minutes on one day and rest on another day.

Then, using electrodes to measure brain activity, participants were shown pictures of food and flowers. On the days that the participants worked out, researchers found that participants had less neural response to the images of the food. Plus, despite a common idea that exercise can make you hungry, the women did not eat more on the days they worked out, instead they ate approximately the same amount of food on the non-exercise day.

“We wanted to see if obesity influenced food motivation, but it didn’t,” said James LeCheminant, one of the study’s authors, in a release. “However, it was clear that the exercise bout was playing a role in their neural responses to the pictures of food.”

Also interesting, the study found that on the days participants exercised, there was an increase in total physical activity that day, regardless of body mass index.

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