Qatar Social and Cultural Centre for the Blind organized an awareness-raising meeting on weight and mental health.

The meeting was held on the occasion of International Youth Day, which came this year under the theme “Transforming Food Diets: Youth Innovations for Human and Planet Health”.

Ghada Al-Musawi, a nutritionist, through the zoom teleconference program, highlighted several axes during the meeting, including emotional eating, overeating or abstinence, the relationship of the mental state to weight, the image of the body and the balance, and how to choose the appropriate diet.

She defined emotional eating as resorting to eating when exposed to an emotional or psychological crisis, so a person resort to food as an outlet for him, and in order to feel that his mood has become better, as if he fills the emotional void by filling his stomach, pointing out that emotional eating is usually not with the aim of filling hunger but in order to suppress or calm negative feelings.

She explained that the way to get rid of this habit which may lead to weight gain, you should stay away as much as possible from stress, tension and psychological pressures, eat healthy foods whenever a person feels hungry, exercise of various types, try to record everything that was eaten during the day, and stay away from harsh diets.

During the meeting, she mentioned the importance of healthy eating and sports on a continuous basis in order to maintain the stability of mental health, and to try to calculate the calories taken during the day. She called for attention to be given to the other causes of weight gain or the difficulty of taking down thyroid levels and other health problems.