Diet-Interoceptive Relationship (DIR)

The Diet-Interoceptive Relationship (DIR) is one of the six core relationship elements of nutritional psychology and describes the bidirectional interplay between dietary intake patterns and interoception — the receiving, encoding, representation, and perception of the body’s internal physiological state (Ceunen et al., 2016; CNP – Diet and Interoception Archives). Within the DIR, food-related interoceptive sensations — hunger, thirst, satiety, post-ingestive signals, and palatability — arise from gut-brain communication and shape when, what, and how much a person eats, while dietary patterns in turn modulate the accuracy and sensitivity of those interoceptive signals (Ströbele-Benschop et al., 2025, PMC; CNP – Western diet and interoceptive signals). Interoceptive Awareness (IA) — supported by insular-cortex processing and vagal signaling and trainable through mindfulness-based practices — is the practical construct through which the DIR is studied, taught, and applied to eating behavior, emotional eating, and the broader Diet-Mental Health Relationship (DMHR).