Why is the tendency to follow a healthy diet and to carry out adequate amounts of physical exercise usually accompanied? It’s not by chance. A new study published in the journalObesity Reviewreveals thatincreased levels of physical activity are associated with an improvement in the quality of the diet.
“Physical activity seems to have a facilitating function of eating behaviors aimed at following a healthy diet,” explains Miguel Alonso Alonso, a researcher at Harvard University (USA) and co-author of the study, to the SINC agency. Exercise brings benefits such asincreased sensitivity to physiological signals of satiety, which influences better appetite control, but alsomodifies pleasant responses to food stimuli. Therefore, the benefits could be divided into those that occur in the short term – predominantly metabolic – and those that appear in the long term – predominantly behavioral.
On the other hand, theregular physical activity produces changes in the function and structure of the brain. Experts note that these changes appear to have some specificity. “Exercising regularly improves performance in tests that measure the state of executive functions and increases the amount of gray matter and connections in prefrontal areas of the brain,” says the Harvard researcher. Among the executive functions, thecontrol inhibitorio, that is, the ability to suppress inappropriate or non-purposeful responses. In other words, physical exercise makes us less impulsive, so that it is easier for us to modify or self-regulate a behavior, for example to lose weight and maintain it in the long term.
Inhibitory control could also prevent weight gain in healthy people, because it helps to resist? The multiple food temptations that appear every day in this society where food, especially hypercaloric food, is increasingly omnipresent ?, underlines Alonso Alonso.
