Can Exercise Make you Hungry?

Hunger and exercise can oftentimes get too chummy, #amiright? You start a new fitness class, or training for a 5K, or lifting weights and you suddenly feel like eating everything in sight. Not exactly welcome when you're trying to lose weight.

Can exercise make you hungry, or is it all in your head?

Some research shows that exercise actually suppresses hunger. What gives? Studies suggest exercise can temporarily blunt appetite, “especially exercise that generates a lot of body heat,” Applegate says. “The rise in body temperature is what creates that hunger-curbing effect.”

Another explanation is that exercise may create a cascade in your biochemistry : According toJamie A. Cooper, PhD, associate professor of nutrition at University of Georgia, a spike in the peptide (small amino acid molecule) called PYY, aka peptide tyrosine tyrosine, plays a major role for temporary satiety, or the feeling of fullness, post-workout.

Three separate studies with a small number of participants;teenage girls with obesity, men in good health, andmen with obesity—revealed that intense exercise can diminish appetite immediately and up to 24 hours after. It does so in a few ways: by increasing peptides that help regulate hunger; by reducing the “hunger hormone” ghrelin; or by peaking growth hormone.

Or maybe the feeling of hunger is only in your head? Research in the journalMetabolism: Clinical and Experimentalfound that in three groups of men, those who exercised hadlower measured levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin post-exercise. Yet, they reportedfeelingmore hungry than the sedentary group. The post-exercise groups ate just as much as the non-exercising group; but because they’d exercised, their calorie output was higher overall for the day.