Research supports an association between altered interoceptive accuracy, or the ability to accurately monitor sensations from the body, and disordered eating. However, the behavioral mechanism through which interoceptive accuracy may influence eating behaviors is unclear. Intuitive eating, the ability to regulate food intake according to visceral cues of hunger and satiety, is positively related to interoceptive accuracy and negatively related to disordered eating. Therefore, we hypothesized that interoceptive accuracy would be negatively associated with intuitive eating which would, in turn, influence eating disorder risk. A mediation analysis was performed to test this hypothesis in a sample of 41 undergraduate women who completed a heartbeat counting task to assess interoceptive accuracy, followed by self-report measures of intuitive eating ability and eating disorder risk. We found that eating for physical rather than emotional reasons and reliance on hunger and satiety cues, two aspects of intuitive eating, mediated the relationship between interoceptive accuracy and eating disorder risk. Although further research is necessary, it is possible that findings regarding the association between interoceptive accuracy and intuitive eating may inform the development of eating disorder prevention efforts.

研究支持感知的准确性改变或准确监测人体感觉与饮食失调之间的联系。但是，通过感知的准确性可能影响进食行为的行为机制尚不清楚。直觉进食是根据内脏饥饿感和饱腹感调节食物摄入量的能力，与感知的准确性正相关，而与饮食紊乱负相关。因此，我们假设，感知的准确性将与直觉饮食产生负相关，这反过来又会影响饮食失调的风险。进行了一项调解分析，以检验41名完成心跳计数任务以评估感知觉准确性的女大学生样本中的这一假设，其次是自我报告的直觉进食能力和进食障碍风险的测量。我们发现饮食是出于生理而非情感原因，以及对饥饿和饱腹感的依赖，这是直觉饮食的两个方面，它介导了感知准确度与饮食失调风险之间的关系。尽管有必要进行进一步的研究，但有关感知间的准确性和直觉饮食之间的关联性的发现可能会为预防饮食失调的努力提供参考。