Do you always feel ravenous by 10 a.m.? Here’s a counter-intuitive way to fix that: Work out before work. Turns out exercise actually reduces the brain’s motivation for food, according to a new study published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.
In the study, researchers examined the food motivation of 18 normal-weight women and 17 clinically obese women over two separate days by exposing them to images of food or flowers while using electroencephalogram (EEG) technology to measure the strength of their brain waves. On the first day of the study, the women walked briskly for 45 minutes on a treadmill before researchers showed them the images, but on the second day, the experiment was repeated without the exercise. The women logged their physical activity and food intake on both days.
“We were looking at how strongly the brain’s response associated with attention was directed toward food stimuli,” explains study co-author Michael J. Larson, PhD, assistant professor of the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Center at Brigham Young University.
What researchers found was that both the normal-weight and obese women paid less attention to the food images right after exercising, regardless of their weight. Meanwhile, exercise had no effect on brain response to the flowers. According to Larson, this means that exercise appears to affect the way our brains respond to food in particular, which could in turn affect our decisions about what and how much we eat–at least right after exercising.
Moreover, the food and physical activity logs of the study subjects revealed that exercise didn’t lead to overeating later in the day. In fact, women who began the day with exercise got more physical activity throughout the rest of the day, without eating more to compensate for the extra calories burned.
If you don’t have time to work out before work, that’s okay–there are other ways to stave off cravings throughout the day.
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