Ever find yourself eating so much after an intense exercise session that it threatens to negate all the hard work you’ve just done?
If so, a new study from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab can help you understand why-and perhaps help you avoid doing so in the future.
According to the study, when we participate in physical activity, how we perceive it can impact how much we eat afterward. If we think of the physical activity as “fun,” we tend to eat less afterward than we do if we think of it as “exercise.”
One of the reasons seems to be that if we think of the activity as exercise or working out, we often feel that we should reward ourselves for doing it with food.
The takeaway? If we want to eat less, we can begin by simply thinking of our physical activity as fun, not as exercise or a workout. Moreover, we should choose physical activities that we enjoy rather than those that we dread so that we will more naturally view them as fun.
Wow! Losing weight might have just gotten a little easier.
For more information, visit foodpsychology.cornell.edu/OP/fun_or_exercise.
To find fun adaptive activities for people with limb loss, visit www.amplitude-media.com/resources.