Motivational aspects of balancing eating and physical exercise in health and disease

Food intake is an essential behavior for acquiring the energy required for survival. Because animals must expend energy through physical movement to obtain food, behavior is inherently constrained by the need to balance energy acquisition and expenditure. Maintaining this balance is fundamental for health. Traditionally, it has been framed from nutritional and metabolic perspectives. From a systems neuroscience perspective, however, it can be understood as a process in which neural circuits continuously allocate motivational resources between feeding and physical activity.Recent evidence suggests that the motivation to eat and the motivation to move are not regulated by independent circuits but by overlapping and reciprocally connected networks.The dopaminergic system is central to this motivational control, governing reward prediction, effort allocation, and goal-directed behavior. Dopamine signaling influences both food-seeking and voluntary physical activity, positioning it as a key mediator of how the brain prioritizes eating relative to movement. Through reinforcement learning and action selection, the dopaminergic system provides a framework for understanding how these priorities are calibrated based on internal states and environmental cues.Hypothalamic circuits, particularly those within the arcuate nucleus (AgRP/POMC neurons) and the lateral hypothalamus, have been classically viewed as regulators of hunger and satiety. However, accumulating evidence indicates that these neurons also modulate motivational states by responding to behavioral variables including voluntary movement, suggesting that hypothalamic networks contribute to the valuation of energy-related actions and interact with dopaminergic pathways to influence behavioral choice.Beyond these systems, the cerebellum is emerging as an important contributor to motivation and reward processing, beyond its established role in motor control. Cerebellar circuits modulate basal ganglia dopaminergic activity through both direct (monosynaptic) projections to the substantia nigra and polysynaptic routes, influencing movement vigor, reinforcement learning, and action selection, interactions that may be particularly relevant for coordinating the motivational drive for physical activity with its execution and associated reward signals.Collectively, these findings support a distributed circuit model in which dopaminergic, hypothalamic, and cerebellar networks interact to regulate the motivational processes underlying eating and physical activity. Disruptions in these circuits may contribute to maladaptive behavioral patterns observed across the eating-disorder spectrum and in obesity, where the balance between motivation for food intake and motivation for physical activity may be compromised.In eating disorders specifically, exercise can become maladaptive, acquiring compulsive features maintained by aberrant reinforcement contingencies rather than homeostatic need, representing a clinically significant manifestation of dysregulated motivation. In obesity, overlapping circuits may contribute to reduced motivation for physical activity alongside altered food-reward processing.This Research Topic welcomes articles addressing neural circuit mechanisms underlying motivation for feeding and physical exercise. We encourage contributions exploring cross-regional circuit interactions, cerebellar–dopaminergic pathways, and translational implications for disorders of energy balance and maladaptive exercise.Subthemes include:• Neural control of feeding behavior and energy balance.• Links between voluntary movement, physical exercise, and feeding behavior.• The role of the dopaminergic system in reward, motivation, and physical activity.• The role of hypothalamic circuits in eating and physical exercise, including AgRP/POMC dynamics during voluntary movement and exercise.• Interactions between hypothalamic and dopaminergic systems.• The role of cerebellar circuits in motor control and reward processing.• Interactions between cerebellar and dopaminergic systems.• Implications for maladaptive eating and exercise patterns in eating disorders (anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge-eating disorder) and in obesity as a chronic metabolic disease, with attention to maladaptive exercise as a transdiagnostic feature maintained by aberrant reinforcement and associative-learning mechanisms. Topic editors: Junichi Yoshida, Ames Sutton Hickey, Maria Scherma Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83811/motivational-aspects-of-balancing-eating-and-physical-exercise-in-health-and-disease