Study instruments
We used a self-administered questionnaire on eating
habits which was adopted from previous published
studies [14,15]. The questionnaire consisted of three
parts. The first part included questions on demographic
data; such as age, gender, education level, marital status,
ethnicity and living circumstances. Body mass index
(BMI) and lifestyle; such as smoking, alcohol intake and
exercise were also included in this part. The second part
includes questions on eating habits and type of meals
consumed (10 items), such as frequency of meals, type
of meal, vegetables and fruits consumption, daily water
intake, consumption of fast food, etc. The third part
included questions on psychological factors that influenced
dietary habits of respondents. Questions were
selected from the validated Compulsive Eating Scale
(CES) [16] that was used to measure uncontrolled eating
patterns among college students; items included in this
study were: “eat because of feeling lonely”, “feel out of
control when eating”, “eat so much until stomach hurts”,
“eat because of feeling upset or nervous”, “eat because of
feeling bored” and “eat because of feeling happy”. The
response options were ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.
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