Mon 22 June 2020:
More and more Malaysians are complaining about their weight gain during coronavirus lockdown in the country starting in mid-March, the Kuala Lumpur based The Star reported.
The newspaper said the development “was not really a surprise” considering that many have become homebound and less active physically.
“Some even chose not to share their most recent photographs on their social media accounts to avoid receiving criticism from their friends,” the report said.
Even before the pandemic, obesity was already a health concern in Malaysia. According to the World Population Review 2019, Malaysia has the highest prevalence of obesity among adults in South-East Asia at 15.6 percent.
The National Health and Morbidity Survey (NHMS) 2019 findings, meanwhile, showed that 50.1 percent of adults in Malaysia were either overweight or obese – 30.4 percent were overweight and 19.7 percent obese.
In a poll of more than 1,000 U.S. readers of WebMD, nearly half of the women and almost one-quarter of the men said they’d gained weight “due to COVID restrictions.” A separate poll of 900 international readers found more than half of men and about a third of women reporting weight gain.
In the last 30 days, more than half a million Facebook users have engaged with terms around quarantine weight gain, including quarantine 15 and #quarantineweight gain.
For those who already struggled with obesity, gaining weight during the COVID-19 pandemic adds more risk. “Early on, we noticed that all of our patients who were immediately intubated at our institution and others had BMIs over 35,” says Caroline Apovian, MD, director of the Nutrition and Weight Management Center at Boston Medical Center. “And they were younger.” Preliminary research published in The Lancet has also found this connection.
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