Background : Adolescents experience puberty, in which physical along with hormonal changes cause adolescents to start paying more attention to their physical appearance and to think that physical attraction plays an important role in social life. The ideal looks that adolescents, especially adolescent girls, desire is influenced by social media, which creates the perception of a slim body as a criteria of beauty. This causes adolescent girls with either fat, normal, or slim body weight to feel a dissatisfaction with their body shape. A majority of adolescent girls engage in unhealthy diet in an attempt to decrease their body weight, which has a detrimental effect to their nutritional status. This research attempts to find the relations of body image and eating pattern with nutritional status in class year 2014 Medical Students in Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia.
Methods : This research is a descriptive analytic study with a cross-sectional approach. The sample size is 75, all of which are class year 2014 female medical students in Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia. Subjects in this research are 17-19 years old. Body image was determined with the Body Shape Questionnaire (BSQ-34), eating pattern was determined with Eating Behavior Patterns Questionnaire (EBPQ), and nutritional status was determined with Body Mass Index (BMI).
Result : An analysis of the data collected shows that: 1) 37,3% subjects are not satisfied with their body shape; 2) the most common eating pattern among subjects is emotional eating (45,3%), whereas the least common eating pattern was cultural/lifestyle behavior (4%); 3) 50,7% subjects have normal body mass index, 20% subjects are overweight, 17,3% subjects are underweight, 6,7% subjects have grade I obesity, and 5,3% subjects have grade II obesity.
The Spearman correlation test shows that: 1) There is a correlation between body image and nutritional status (p=0,002; r=0,358); 2) there is no correlation between eating pattern and nutritional status (p=0,287; r=0,125).
Conclusion : There is a relation between body image and nutritional status, but there is no relation between eating pattern and nutritional status. |