Impact Of COVID-19 Quarantine On Body Weight And Eating Habits

ABSTRACT

Since start of pandemic and lockdown imposed by the government people have limited access to fresh food and people spent more time by staying at home. However, staying at home had brought some positive habits among people such as cooking food at home instead of eating junk or fast food. On the other hand, staying home had changes dietary habits of people and cause in gaining more weight during the lockdown. Increase in weight and change in dietary habits have negative effects on health of population. We aimed to investigate the impact of COVID-19 lockdown on body weight and dietary habits of Saudi people. We used survey research design to collect the data from Saudi Arabia. Nature of the study was quantitative and nature of the data collected and used in the study was cross-sectional data. Non-probability convenience sampling technique was used to select the sample size. Total 516 completed responses were received and used in the analysis of the data. SPSS was used for data analysis. Questionnaire adopted in this study consist of three sections, first section contains information about age, gender, chronic disease and height of the respondents, second section included weight and body mass index (BMI) of the respondents before and during pandemic quarantine. Third section consists of eating behavior, dietary habits and health status. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used. in descriptive statistics mean and standard deviation along with percentage were calculated while in order to test hypotheses pair sample t-test and chi-square test were applied. Analysis of results revealed that female participation in the study was high as compared to men. Moreover, majority of the respondents have revealed that they have no chronic disease. Findings of pair sample t-test have revealed that there is significant change in body weight and BMI of females is recorded but there was no significant difference/change in body weight and BMI of male respondents' before and during quarantine. Furthermore, there is significant different found in eating behavior and dietary habit of respondents' during quarantine. Copyright © 2022, Anka Publishers. All rights reserved.