Determination of the effect of BODY composition on emotional and intuitive eating habits in licensed female volleyball players

This research aims to determine the emotional and intuitive eating habits of licensed volleyball players and to investigate the effect of body composition, which may affect their physical and conditional states, on intuitive and emotional eating habits. The research was carried out between December 2021 and February 2022 with women's volleyball teams, affiliated to the Turkish Volleyball Federation, in the 2nd league and university league and with 44 volleybal players. For data collection face-to-face questionnaire was applied. With the questionnaire, volleyball players' sociodemographic information, volleyball careers, diseases, use of ergogenic or nutritional supplement, presence of past nutritional education, eating habits, sports and nutrition relationship, mood and nutrition relationship were questioned. Intuitive Eating Scale (IES-2) was used to determine volleyball players' intuitive eating levels; The Power of Food Scale (PFS) was used to determine emotional eating levels. Anthropometric measurements such as body weight, height, waist and thigh circumference and skinfold measurements were carried out by the researcher in order to determine the body compositions of volleyball players. The average value of age of the participants was 21.1±3.53 years. The average value of body weight of the participants was 63.9±8.18 kg, height was 175.9±7.26 cm, body mass index (BMI) values were 20.6±2.10 kg/m2, and body fat ratio was 22.6±10.10%. It was determined that body fat ratio did not have a significant effect on intuitive eating scale total scores (p>0.05). Only one sub-factor of intuitive eating, which is eating for physical rather than emotional reasons (t= -2.945, p<0.05), was found to be affected by body fat ratio levels. One-unit increase in body fat will cause a 0.275 unit decrease in the levels of eating for physical rather than emotional reasons. It was determined two subfactors were affected by body fat ratio levels: food present (t=2.701, p<0.05) and food tasted (t=2.407, p<0.05). One-unit increase in body fat would result in a 0.116 unit increase in food present levels, and a 0.100 unit increase in the food tasted levels. It has been verified that the situation in which body composition has the greatest effect is the total PFS score (0.312) (t=2.505, p<0.05). It was found that the body compositions of volleyball players affected their emotional eating habits the highest.