Do you feel more hungry after you exercise, or less hungry? Is that hunger real, or is it just you telling yourself “it’s okay to eat” because you just worked out?
I am probably not the best person to discuss hunger. I don’t have the best sense of real hunger after so many years of eating when I’m not hungry because I’m low, not eating when I think I’m hungry because I was trying to lose weight, stopping when I’m full versus stopping when I’ve eaten enough carbohydrates to cover the insulin I took 15 minutes ago—always trying to eat enough but not too much gets fairly difficult while trying to simultaneously manage the nutrients my body needs to perform and all of the social aspects of eating.
It gets difficult.
Which is why I find it so curious that after a long run, I’m rarely hungry. (Long run = 90+ minutes) I would have thought that I’d come home and be starving! But that just doesn’t happen. I don’t get “hungry” for a couple of hours after a long run.
I also know that the old trick of taking a walk around the block when you think you’re hungry can really work when you’re faced with a clock that is slowly turning from 3:30 to 4:00 and dinner isn’t until 6:30 or 7:00… a lot of damage can be done in that hour if you haven’t had a good breakfast and lunch!
So I thought this study evaluating the hunger levels of 11 male university students over three 8-hour sessions was worth a blog post.
The participants ran for 60 minutes on the treadmill for one session, did 90 minutes of resistance training for another session, and did no exercise for the third session. The researchers studied two key appetite hormones in the subjects’ bodies: ghrelin and peptide YY. (No worries: no quiz at the end of this!) Ghrelin is the only hormone known to stimulate appetite, while peptide YY suppresses appetite. The study participants also answered questions about their hunger after each session.
The researchers found that during the treadmill session, when the participants were performing aerobic exercise, ghrelin levels dropped and peptide YY levels increased—the hormones were suppressing appetite. In the resistance session, the ghrelin levels dropped but the peptide YY levels didn’t change.
According to the participants, though, both aerobic and resistance exercise suppressed hunger, but the aerobic exercise did so to a greater degree.
This would explain my long run phenomenon.
So next time you’re feeling ravenous and can’t quite figure out why, maybe it’s just that your ghrelin is out of whack.
