The best part of going to the gym, the absolutely best part of going to the gym, is the pizza. After 40 minutes on the cross trainer, watching the timer slowly, painfully sliding towards 00:00, it’s time to grab a slice. After all, I deserve it. Now I know this is irrational, self-defeating and only increasing further self-hatred, but I really like pizza after going to the gym.

Fortunately, a group of researchers released a paper this month that gives me some insight into my destructive pizza-gym cycle. The researchers started with a known problem: people who exercise regularly often don’t lose weight. They eat junk food afterward and overestimate how many calories they burned.

But here’s where it gets interesting: how you frame an activity changes what you do afterward. For example, people who took part in some charitable activity were more likely to say they would buy a more expensive, frivolous item later. In one experiment, researchers found that, when a walk was labelled exercise, participants treated themselves to more M&M’s than when the walk was labelled fun. And in another experiment, they found that runners who enjoyed a race tended to choose a healthier snack after the race.

So both how you frame exercise and how you experience it affect what you eat afterward—including my pizza-munching tendencies. The paper doesn’t go into how to best frame exercise as fun or how to make the experience of exercise more fun, but other researchers and my own experience give us a few hints.

The first thing I’m going to do is change my calendar reminder that tells me today is a gym day from “GO TO THE GYM YOU LAZY ?!#!#!” to something more positive. Music is good, but I find that I really lose track of time when listening to a podcast or a good audio book, so I’m going to make sure the iPhone is loaded up with something lengthy and engaging before my next gym visit.

Finally, I’m going to the gym with my friends more often or at the very least attending a class. I’m the first to admit that listening to hard house and reciprocating the highest of high-fives from a stranger at your local spin class at 6:30 on a Wednesday morning is mildly ridiculous, but it’s also kind of fun.

If you try re-framing your gym visits, let me know how you get on. I do love a good field experiment!