The exercise conundrum: sometimes active people put on more weight than couch potatoes - here's why

Governments are always telling us to eat less and exercise more to be healthier, but this presents an obvious problem. Being active is liable to make you hungrier, so there’s a risk you end up eating extra to compensate, and putting on more weight than if you’d never got off the sofa in the first place.

Dieticians dream of the day when they can design diets for people where they are more active but don’t get hungry in the process. Unfortunately it’s trickier than you might think: we’re still searching for the mechanism that governs how the energy we expend translates into our level of appetite. And as we shall see, that’s by no means the only thing that makes this area complicated.