Enjoying your workout might be key to eating less later

Many people engage in physical activity to justify an incentive later, usually dessert or other sweets, but new information from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab shows enjoying your workout may eliminate this desire to enjoy unnecessary calories.

The research included three studies to determine how perceiving exercise affected food intake. The findings showed that when folks thought of their exercise as a fun activity, they ate less food for the purpose of enjoyment and pleasure following a workout.

The first two studies manipulated how participants perceived an actual activity.? After completing the game, which was described either as exercise or fun, researchers measured their food consumption.? Participants in the first study freely consumed as numerous calories because they wanted while participants within the second study served themselves M&M’s?. Researchers compared the amount of hedonic calories consumed by each group and found the exercise group consumed much more empty calories.

The third study asked runners in a race just how much fun they had while running.? Researchers gave the runners an option between a hedonic snack and utilitarian snack, food consumed from need, and found runners who rated the race as fun were more prone to make the healthy snack choice.

The study authors said framing exercise as a fun activity reduces a person’s urge to indulge by diverting his or her attention from the the necessary effort through the activity, which may reduce the sense of “entitlement” for any food reward.

“Do whatever you can to create your exercise routine fun.? Be a musician, watch a video, or simply be grateful that you are exercising instead of working in work,” Brian Wansink, author and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, said inside a news release. “Anything which brings a grin will probably get you to consume less food.”

Dr. Jennifer DeBruler, an interior medicine physician with Advocate Medical Group in Libertyville, Ill., said she agrees exercise may give people the “erroneous permission” to consume more.

“It is important that calories in ‘need’ to become under calories ‘out’ to lose weight, exercise or not,” Dr. Debruler said.? “A 500 calorie deficit per day will result in 1 pound each week weight reduction.”

The United States Department of Agriculture has these suggestions for incorporating physical activity to your daily routine without it seeming just like a chore.