The Covid-19 pandemic makes you fat. Mainly affecting the weight gain, over 4 kg, recorded during the Covid-19 emergency in Italians suffering from obesity: isolation, emotional dysregulation, unstable working conditions and interruption of nutritional counseling. To be most affected: unemployed, smart workers, people with significant emotional distress and housewives. This is what emerges from the final results of a multi-center non-profit study conducted by the Adi Foundation (Italian Association of Dietetics and Clinical Nutrition) during the lockdown phases of the Covid-19 emergency on a sample of 1,300 obese patients treated in the Obesity Centers. Day related to Adi.
During lockdown periods, 48.8% of the people interviewed gained weight, 27% decreased, while 24% remained stable. In patients with weight gain, psycho-physical well-being decreased by 69.6%, 62% experienced emotional difficulties, mainly fear and dissatisfaction, 55% experienced a change in the quality / quantity of sleep with insomnia or early awakening, 56% reduced physical activity, 68% encountered difficulties in following the diet, 58% did not keep in contact with their center or consultant, but above all the majority of them he ate badly by drastically reducing the amount of foods present in the Mediterranean diet.
In the cluster of people who gained weight, it also emerged that 68% of them would have liked to be helped with obesity drugs. In obese subjects who, on the other hand, managed to maintain an unchanged weight or even lose weight (57%), it was seen as a more stable working condition, the maintenance of therapeutic treatments with telemedicine and constant physical activity have positively influenced psycho- physicist.
The anticipated research on the occasion of Obesity Day 2021
Waiting to be published in the ‘International Journal Obesity’, the research is announced in conjunction with Obesity Day 2021, the national obesity awareness campaign promoted by Adi and every 10 October throughout the country and that this given the persistence of the Covid-19 emergency, it will take place outdoors in some Italian squares and online with the Obesity # NextGeneration webinar on 8 October starting at 5 pm.
“The results that emerged from this survey – underlines Antonio Caretto, president of the Adi Foundation – highlight how during the darkest months of the pandemic, when everything seemed to have stopped, chronic and disabling diseases such as obesity have unfortunately continued to worsen with alarming effects on the state health and psychophysical well-being of patients and important economic repercussions on the national health system. Unfortunately, the interruption of outpatient visits during the lockdown is not followed – underlines Caretto – by a homogeneous and accessible telemedicine service for all, provoking especially in the most vulnerable groups of patients an interruption of periodic checks and therapeutic paths with a consequent change in eating habits and lifestyle “.
“When in 2001 the ADI instituted Obesity Day – recalls Carmela Bagnato, Adi secretary – it indicated the Dietetics and Clinical Nutrition Services of the National Health Service as qualified principals of diagnosis and therapy for obesity. Today, throughout Italy, except for a few a privileged reality, the Dietetics Services are not homogeneously distributed throughout the national territory. A multifactorial pathology such as obesity – concludes Bagnato – requires an integrated and non-fragmented therapeutic approach, there is a need for a complex prevention strategy that will abandon forever the paradigm of personal responsibility, and which involves obesioogenic environments and social rhythms in change “.