The Relationship beetwen Emotional Eating and Weight Gain Problem among Medical Student of Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa University

Abstract

Emotional eating is a phenomenon of eating behavior triggered by emotions, especially negative emotions such as stress, anxiety, or depression. This behavior is of particular concern in public health due to its contribution to overweight and obesity prevalence across different age groups. In the context of certain populations, such as medical students, weight gain is often influenced by unhealthy lifestyles due to high academic pressure. Stress due to a heavy academic load can trigger unhealthy eating behaviors, one of which is emotional eating, which is the tendency to overeat in response to negative emotions such as stress, anxiety, or sadness. This study is an analytic observational study using a cross-sectional study design and the sampling technique used is simple random sampling with the aim of evaluating the relationship between emotional eating as an independent variable with excessive body weight as the dependent variable, in medical students of the Faculty of Medicine, Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa University. The number of medical students at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa University, who have the habit of emotional eating is 38 students (50.7%), and the number of students who are excess weight is 28 students (37.3%). Additionally, 16 students (21.30%) have both excess weight and emotional eating habits, while 25 students (33.30%) don’t have either excess weight or emotional eating habits. There was an insignificant relationship between the incidence of emotional eating and excessive body weight in medical students of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa University.

Keywords : emotional eating, weight gain problem, medical students, faculty of medicine