When It's Not Just in Your Head

Celiac, mood, and what food can and can't do about it.

A lot of you have written to me about this over the years. Some of you told me straight out. Others just mentioned in passing that you've been "off" since the diagnosis, or before it, or for as long as you can remember.

I want to talk about it. Carefully, because you deserve careful.

Please read this part first

If you're in crisis, or thinking about hurting yourself, reach out right now. In the United States you can call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any hour of any day. If you're somewhere else, your local emergency number will get you to someone.

Nothing on this page is for that moment. That moment needs a person, not a plate of food. Please make the call, and please tell somebody who loves you.

The four things I'm actually asking

Here's the whole post in one box. Everything after this is me showing my work.

The short version

1. Get real medical care. Therapy and psychiatric care are the treatment. Everything else sits underneath that.
2. Rule out the physical things, because with celiac there are several, and they get missed constantly.
3. Feed yourself well and feed your gut, which is a real thing and not a small one.
4. Do the free things. Sleep, light, movement, people. They're better supported than anything in a bottle.

Let me say what I'm NOT saying

There's a lot of loose talk in the wellness world about food fixing everything, and I'm not going to add to it.

Depression is a real medical condition. It isn't a character flaw and it isn't a lack of faith. I want to say that especially loudly to my friends at church. I've watched good people carry shame on top of an illness, and I have never once seen the shame help.

No supplement treats depression. Not one. If somebody tells you a capsule will fix this, walk away.

Don't stop your medication. Not because of this post, not because of anything you read anywhere. If you're on an antidepressant and wondering about it, that conversation belongs with the person who prescribed it. Stopping suddenly can be dangerous.

Real food is not a replacement for treatment. It's the ground the treatment stands on. That's a real thing and it's also a much smaller claim than the one you usually hear.

Why celiac belongs in this conversation at all

Because the connection is real, and because so many of us spent years being told it was all in our heads.

The nutrients your brain runs on are the exact ones celiac steals

Look at this list and then look at it again.

• B12. Low B12 can look almost exactly like depression. Fatigue, fog, low mood, sometimes tingling in your hands and feet. It absorbs poorly with damaged villi, and pulling fortified wheat out of your diet took another source with it.
• Folate. Needed to build neurotransmitters. Also absorbs poorly, also was in that fortified flour.
• Iron. The most common deficiency in newly diagnosed celiac. Low iron is a bone-deep tired that feels a lot like not caring about anything.
• Vitamin D. Receptors for it all through the brain, and absorption takes a hit when the small intestine is damaged.
• Magnesium. Involved in hundreds of reactions including in the nervous system.
• Iodine and thyroid. Thyroid trouble can present as depression, and thyroid autoimmunity travels with celiac more often than chance.
• Omega-3 fats. DHA is structural in your brain. It's part of the membrane of your brain cells.

Every single one of those is a thing that goes low in celiac. Every single one of them affects mood.

Which means: if you have celiac and you're struggling, ask for bloodwork. Not instead of mental health care. Alongside it. B12, folate, iron and ferritin, vitamin D, thyroid. Any doctor will run those, and you should be having most of them checked regularly anyway.

The gut and the brain are talking constantly

I wrote a whole book about this one, so I'll keep it short here!

Your gut and your brain are in constant conversation. Through the vagus nerve, through immune signaling, through compounds your gut bacteria make. It's an active area of research and there's more we don't know than we do.

But if your digestion has been a wreck for years, that is not unrelated to how you feel. It's not the whole story either. It's not unrelated.

The years before the diagnosis

This is the one I feel most.

Most of us weren't diagnosed quickly. We were tired and foggy and sick, and we went to doctors, and somewhere along the way somebody suggested it might be anxiety. Or stress. Or that we were a little too focused on our symptoms.

Being disbelieved about your own body for years does something to a person. It's its own wound, on top of whatever the celiac was doing. And it doesn't heal the day the biopsy comes back.

If that's you, please hear this: you weren't crazy and you weren't dramatic. You were sick and nobody found it. Those are different things.

And then the diagnosis itself is hard

We don't talk about this enough. A celiac diagnosis is a relief and a grief at the same time.

Every meal becomes a decision. Eating out becomes a negotiation. Traveling becomes a project. You get uninvited from things, or you go and sit there with your water. People think you're being difficult. Somebody's grandma is offended about the rolls.

And you're vigilant all the time, which is exhausting in a way that's hard to explain to anybody who isn't doing it.

That's not weakness. That's a genuinely heavy load, and feeling low under it makes sense.

Getting glutened does a number on your head

You already know this if you've lived it. The fog, the flatness, the short fuse, the feeling of being three steps behind for days afterward.

The best thing I know to do is what you'd do for anyone recovering from anything. Sleep. Water. Simple food. And be kind to yourself, because your judgment about your whole life is not reliable on day two after an exposure. Don't make big decisions in the fog.

What real food actually does here

Now the part where food genuinely helps, stated at the size it deserves.

Eat enough

Starting here on purpose. A celiac diagnosis teaches you to subtract, and when you're depressed, cooking feels impossible. Between those two, a lot of us end up eating far too little without meaning to.

Underfueling makes mood worse. It's not a small factor. And if you notice your eating has gotten very restricted or very anxious, please talk to somebody. That's a real thing that happens after a food-related diagnosis and it deserves real help, not willpower.

Lower the bar on cooking. Eggs and fruit is a meal. Rotisserie chicken and a bag of salad is a meal. Nobody's grading you.

Protein at breakfast

The simplest change on this page and one of the most noticeable.

Gluten-free breakfast food is mostly starch and sugar. Cereal, toast made of rice starch, a muffin. You spike, you crash, and by ten in the morning you're irritable and foggy and blaming yourself for it.

Eggs. Leftover meat. Full-fat yogurt or kefir if dairy works for you. See what your afternoons do.

Liver, if you can manage it

I'm not being cute. Liver is the most concentrated food source of B12 there is, plus folate, iron, and vitamin A. Those are exactly the nutrients that go low in celiac and exactly the ones tied to mood.

Beef, lamb, or chicken liver from a pasture-raised animal, once a week, is plenty. If it makes you gag, join the club! Grate it frozen into ground beef where nobody will know. Or start with chicken liver, which is milder. Or capsules. Nobody's handing out medals.

Ferments and fiber

Ferments give you bacteria. Fiber feeds them once they're there. You need both.

And variety matters more than amount. Different fibers feed different bacteria in different stretches of your colon, so a wide range of plants beats a whole lot of one plant. Taking one kind of fiber is like feeding one kid at a table of eight. Somebody's going hungry down at the end.

Most of us get about half the fiber we need, and going gluten-free usually makes that worse. When you pull wheat out, the fiber goes with it, and the gluten-free replacements at the store are mostly white starch.

Sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir if you tolerate dairy. Certified gluten-free miso, because plenty of miso is made with barley. Start with a forkful, not a bowl.

Vegetables, fruit, beans if you tolerate them, nuts, seeds, whole gluten-free grains like quinoa and buckwheat. Aim for a wide range rather than a lot of one thing.

Where a fiber blend fits

This is one of the supplements I actually use, so let me tell you what's in it.

ZinoBiotic+ is a powder with eight different fibers in it instead of the one or two most fiber products have. Resistant starch from corn, potatoes, and green bananas. Beta-glucans from oats. Inulin. Fructo-oligosaccharides. Psyllium husk. Guar gum.

The variety is the whole design. Eight fibers ferment in different stretches of the colon, so you're feeding the whole length of the table instead of one end.

What I like about it: no excipients at all, meaning no fillers or binders or anti-caking anything, just the active ingredients. The oat beta-glucans are specified gluten-free and free from cross-grain contamination. And it's Informed Sport certified, which means batches get tested by an outside lab. That's an athlete standard, and a company willing to submit to it is a company I feel better asking a gluten question.

Two things before you start. Drink extra water, because fiber without enough fluid leaves you constipated and miserable, which is the opposite of the point. And start low. There's usually an adjustment stretch while the bacteria population shifts. It passes. Don't take a full scoop on day one, feel bloated, and decide fiber isn't for you!

On the oats. The company specifies those beta-glucans as gluten-free and free from cross-grain contamination, and that's more than most companies bother with. Even so, oats are oats. If you're highly sensitive, ask them directly for the current documentation before you order. Verify instead of assuming. I've been burned by assuming.

One caution, since this is a post about mood. A fiber powder is not going to lift depression. What it does is help the gut that's part of the conversation, and a gut that's working better absorbs the nutrients on that list up above. That's the size of the claim and I'm not stretching it.

Fat, and the kind of fat

Your brain is largely fat and DHA is part of its structure. Fatty fish, sardines, pastured eggs, grass-fed meat, butter.

And the ratio matters more than the amount. Omega-6 and omega-3 compete for the same space in your cells. The American average, from Zinzino's testing database of over a million and a half samples, runs about 25 to 1 against a research target of 3:1 or lower. Gluten-free packaged food lives in the middle aisles where all that omega-6 hides.

Vitamin D, and our winters

Worth its own section, because low is common and quiet and easy to fix.

Vitamin D acts more like a hormone than a vitamin, and there are receptors for it throughout the brain. Your skin makes it from a certain kind of sunlight called UVB, and UVB doesn't reach us year round. The further from the equator you live, the more months the sun sits too low for enough to get through.

So a blinding January afternoon feels like plenty of sun and gives your skin almost nothing to work with. You're not doing anything wrong! The light just isn't the right kind yet.

Add damaged villi to that and you have two strikes. If you've noticed the heaviness gets worse every winter, you're not imagining the pattern.

Get the number. Test at the end of winter if you only ever do it once. There's an at-home dried blood spot test for this, or your doctor can run it. Either way works. Getting the number is what matters.

About the mood supplements

People ask me about these, so here's what I know.

Viva+ is in Zinzino's Restore line, the group aimed at brain fog, fatigue, and mood. What's in it: a standardized saffron extract called Affron, magnesium from seawater, B vitamins including B6 and B12 from buckwheat sprouts, vitamin C from acerola, and iodine.

The claims allowed are about supporting normal psychological function, normal nervous system function, and reducing tiredness and fatigue. That's the framing they're permitted to use and I'm staying inside it.

The saffron research is more interesting than most botanicals and more limited than the marketing suggests. Some trials compared it head to head with standard antidepressants for mild to moderate symptoms and didn't find a significant difference. Others looked at adding it on top of medication. But a lot of those trials are small, a lot are short, four to eight weeks, and some are industry funded. A small short study is not the same as proven.

Please read this if you take an antidepressant

Talk to your prescriber before you add Viva+ or any saffron supplement.

Saffron appears to work on serotonin pathways. So do SSRIs and SNRIs. When two things push on the same system there's a theoretical risk of too much serotonin activity, called serotonin syndrome, and it's serious.

Fair reading of the evidence: trials that combined saffron with antidepressants have generally reported good tolerability, and I'm not aware of reported cases of serotonin syndrome from that combination. The risk looks low. But low isn't zero, the studies are short, and your prescriber knows your dose and your history in a way no blog post ever will.

Five minute phone call. Take the ingredient list with you. Same goes if you're pregnant or nursing, on blood thinners, or managing a thyroid condition, since there's iodine in it.

The free things, which come first

If you do nothing else on this page, do these.

• Sleep. Not a luxury. Sleep and mood are so tangled together it's hard to say which came first, and protecting sleep helps both.
• Morning light. Outside, in real daylight, within an hour of waking if you can manage it. Even a gray morning is far brighter than your kitchen.
• Movement. Not a workout. A walk. The bar is much lower than people think.
• People. Depression tells you to withdraw and withdrawing makes it worse. This is harder with celiac, because so much socializing happens around food you can't eat. Go anyway. Eat first and go for the company.
• Professional help. This belongs at the top of the list. I put it last so it's what you read right before you close the page.

Where I've landed on my own health

Some of you know the history. Lyme disease. Relearning how to speak, how to walk, how to do arithmetic a third grader could do. Years of my brain not working the way it used to, and that particular grief of remembering what you used to be able to do.

I'm writing again now. My brain feels like mine. My body feels alive.

I can't tell you how much of that is nutrition and how much is time, prayer, my husband, my coach, plain stubbornness, and the mercy of God. I'd be lying if I claimed to know the proportions! What I can tell you is that I quit guessing about what my body was short on, and things got better, and I'm not going back to guessing.

That's a testimony, not a study. Please take it as exactly that.

What I'd actually do

1. Call your doctor and ask for the bloodwork. B12, folate, iron and ferritin, vitamin D, thyroid.
2. Get mental health care. Not last, not after you've tried everything else. Now.
3. Fix what's actually low. Yours, not what a label picked for you.
4. Eat enough, and put protein at breakfast.
5. Ask your prescriber before adding any supplement if you're on medication.
6. Give it time. Your cells turn over across months, and gut healing takes longer than that. Nothing here works in a week.

What I really want to say

I didn't write this to sell you anything. If you close this page and the only thing you do is call your doctor, I'll count it a good day.

Depression lies. It tells you this is permanent, that you're a burden, that people are only being polite. Those are symptoms talking, and symptoms are not prophets.

And if you've spent years being told your body was fine when it wasn't, you may have learned not to trust yourself. Please start trusting yourself again. You know when something is wrong. You were right before.

You are loved. You are not a burden to me. And if you're reading this at two in the morning wondering whether anybody would notice, I would notice.

One more time, because it matters most

If you're in crisis or having thoughts of harming yourself, call or text 988 in the United States, any hour, day or night. If you're somewhere else, please use your local emergency number.

And if it's easier, write to me. I'll sit with you while you make the call.

With much love,
Steffi

I'm an independent Zinzino partner and an independent doTERRA Wellness Advocate, and I earn a commission on some products I mention. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Nothing here is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, including depression, anxiety, or any other mental health condition. Nothing here is medical advice. I'm a Nutritional Herbalist, not a physician or a mental health professional. Food supplements are not a substitute for a varied and balanced diet or for prescribed medication. Never start, stop, or change any medication without speaking to the clinician who prescribed it. Please work with your own qualified healthcare provider, especially if you take antidepressant or other psychiatric medication, are pregnant or nursing, or are managing any diagnosed condition. Product formulations and allergen information change, so verify current details before you buy.