Investigation of relationship between eating behaviors, depression and stigmatization in obese individuals

This study was carried out to evaluate the relationship between stigmatization and eating behaviors and depression in obese individuals. In this study, we aimed to determine the weight stigma and internalized weight bias, depression, eating behaviors and self-esteem in overweigt and obese individuals. The survey was conducted in February-April 2018 with 106 women and 39 men with a total of 145 overweigt and obese individuals who accepted to take part in the study voluntarily. In this study, a questionnaire which is prepared by the researcher, Brief Stigmatizing Situations Inventory (SSI-B), Modified Weight Bias Internalization Scale (MWBIS), Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (DEBQ), Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale (RSES) were used as a data collection tool. In this study the validity and reliability analysis of the SSI-B inventory was conducted in Turkish. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient of SSI-B was found to be 0.848 and was found to show high reliability. Study data were evaluated using appropriate statistical methods using the SPSS 20.0 package programme. The average scores of the overweight and obese individuals were found 1.62 for SSI-B, 4.11 for MWBIS, 3.0 for DEBQ, 19.71 for CES-D and 20.66 for RSES. At the end of the study, it was found that the participants with higher initial weight were more likely to frequent stigmatizing conditions (p = 0.011). In addition, participants with higher BMI levels were found to have more frequent stigmatizing conditions (p=0.005). There is a linear relationship between the frequency of encounter with the stigmatizing situations that people face due to their overweight and the level of weight bias internalization. Thus, the level of internalization of the prejudices of people with higher incidence of stigmatizing situations is also high (r=0.279 ; p=0.001). There is a linear relationship between the frequency of stigmatizing situations and the level of feeling in depression. According to this, people who experience these conditions more frequently feel higher levels of depression (r=0.177 ; p=0.033). There is an inverse relationship between the incidence of stigmatizing situations and the level of self-esteem. The self-esteem perception of people with higher incidence of such situations is lower (r=-0.234 ; p=0.003). There was a linear relationship between weight bias internalization score and emotional and external eating levels. Accordingly, individuals with higher levels of internalizing prejudices have higher levels of emotional eating (r=0.343 ; p<0.001) and external eating (r=0.214 ; p=0.010). A positive linear correlation was also found between the levels of internalizing prejudices of weight and levels of depression. People with high levels of internalization have high levels of depression (r=0.367 ; p<0.001). Keywords; obesity, weight stigma, internalized stigma, depression, eating behavior.