INTRODUCTION
SECONDARY
The interaction of exercise with appetite control and food intake attracts widespread interest due to the ability of exercise to influence weight management (Blundell et al., Appetite‐related brain responses can be explored using blood‐oxygen‐level‐dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is often performed during visual food cue reactivity tasks (Dagher, Exploring immediate exercise‐induced effects on food cue reactivity could be influenced by the dynamic cardio‐pulmonary changes that alter cerebrovascular function in response to an exercise bout. The elevated brain neural activity and metabolic demands of exercise are met by a concomitant increase in cerebral blood flow (CBF) up to intensities of ~60% of maximum oxygen uptake beyond which CBF typically declines towards baseline values (Ogoh & Ainslie, Investigations of the time‐course of exercise‐induced changes in regional CBF have demonstrated both increased (Steventon et al., The primary aims of this study were to (i) track the temporal pattern of CBF in the immediate post‐exercise period to identify the optimum time to conduct fMRI acquisitions using a food cue paradigm and (ii) determine the importance of accounting for CBF effects that may influence the BOLD signal during a food cue reactivity task. As a secondary aim, we sought to characterize the effect of acute exercise on neural responses to food cues varying in energy density. It was hypothesized that exercise would increase grey matter and regional CBF compared to a resting control trial, but the changes would show a time‐dependent effect, returning to baseline within 30 min of exercise cessation.