People all know that exercising can maintain health and fitness, but in this age of abundance of food and constant temptation, have you ever struggled with weight loss, dieting, and sticking to exercise?
Imagine sitting on your sofa at home, facing tempting chocolate cake and ice cream; what kind of strength can make you resolutely give up delicious food to go running or lifting weights at the gym? And if you choose the food, is it really due to weak willpower and laziness, succumbing to the temptation of food? Not at all!
On August 6, the journal “Nature” published a study by Swiss neuroscientists titled “Hunger Neurons Mediating Autonomous Activity Against Temptation.” The researchers wanted to know what factors led the laboratory mice, used as experimental models, to choose running on a wheel over super delicious food without hesitation in various choice scenarios, thus maintaining voluntary exercise?
The researchers designed an eight-arm maze model for the experimental mice, where each path had different options, including a running wheel, novelty toys, an unfamiliar mouse, water, bright areas, dark areas, regular food (ordinary mouse pellets), and a path that was either empty or contained super delicious/high palatability food. The mice were placed in the center of the maze to explore freely and choose different path tunnels.
The researchers tracked and recorded the mice’s behavior and the time spent on each option, limiting the experiment to 10 minutes to capture their initial decision-making process.
The experimental results showed that in the absence of super delicious food, the mice chose to spend a lot of time in the running wheel and regular food area, even when no additional rewards were available. Surprisingly, when super delicious food was introduced, the time the mice spent on the running wheel and the total distance traveled in the maze did not change.
Researchers found that this preference for wheel running was mediated by hunger neurons in the hypothalamus (HONs). When the appetite receptor antagonist ALMO was injected into the abdominal cavity to block two types of appetite receptors present in both mice and humans, the total distance traveled by the mice in the maze remained unchanged, but the time spent on the running wheel significantly decreased.
In other words, after appetite was blocked, the presence of delicious food reduced the “attractiveness” of the running wheel, making the mice less willing to exercise voluntarily.
Further analysis indicated that even when faced with food temptations, the activity of endogenous appetite receptors still inclined the mice to prefer running on the wheel and suppressed the behavior of choosing high temptation food. This means that hunger neurons (HONs) play a key role in helping mice resist food temptations and maintain voluntary exercise by weighing the priorities between eating and exercising.
Since humans and mice have the same appetite receptors, this discovery may provide new insights into understanding how humans can stick to exercise in the face of food temptations. When faced with the choice between indulging in food and exercising, people do not solely rely on so-called “willpower” to resist food temptations, nor on “self-control” to exercise actively—in fact, human decision-making is influenced by hunger neurons (HONs) in the brain, prompting people to choose to exercise and suppress their cravings for food.
In simple terms, hunger neurons (HONs) function like a fitness coach in our brains, helping you at a critical moment when faced with the choice of either indulging in food or exercising.
