Is Working Out Making You Overeat?

When most people finish a workout, they want a reward for all that hard work, which usually involves food. This makes sense, right? After burning a ton of calories, you’ve earned a treat, right.

Actually, wrong.

Moderate-intensity aerobic training can actually decrease your appetite, according to recent research. And when people do reward themselves with food, they tend to overdo it, increasing the calories they consume and destroying their weight loss efforts.

“Exercise can definitely suppress hunger,” says Barry Braun, PhD, director of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has co-authored multiple studies on the subject.

How, why, and for how long afterward is something researchers are still working out. They do know that workouts trigger changes in the hunger hormone, acylated ghrelin, and the satiety hormones, PYY and GLP-1—though research has yet to establish the exact relationship.

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