Running may help you store less fat, consume fewer calories, two new studies show

Vigorous exercise significantly suppresses the appetite, likely due to the release of certain hormones that block hunger, University of Western Australia researchers concluded in a new study published in the International Journal of Obesity.

For the small survey, 17 overweight men participated in four 30-minute exercise sessions of varying degrees of intensity and were all given a small liquid meal after the workout. They were then offered more food an hour later and told to eat until they felt full. Those who exercised intensely ate, on average, 200 fewer calories in each of the post-workout, eat-until-full meals.

“This study provides some promising preliminary support for this notion, but further research is needed to investigate this in a longer-term study,” said lead researcher Aaron Sim.

Another promising study on exercise and weight loss showed that six months of regular aerobic exercise alters the action of the genes involved in fat storage. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden found that key genes that affect the storage of blood sugar inside fat cells are rendered less active by regular exercise, which included spinning and aerobics classes.

In this study, published in the journal PLOS Genetics, overweight but healthy subjects were instructed to exercise for three hours a week over six months (they only managed 1.8). Scientists took tissue samples of their body fat before and after the exercise to examine the epigenetic imprinting. They discovered that exercise affect 7,663 genes out of the total human genome of 20,000, claiming the findings show the complex interaction between genes that could lead to obesity and diabetes.

More tests revealed that certain changes in two key genes reduced the storage of fatty acids.

“This suggests that altered DNA methylation as a result of physical activity could be one of the mechanisms of how these genes affect the risk of disease,” said head researcher Tina Rönn. “This has never before been studied in fat cells.”