I had major depression and a full blown general anxiety disorder in my 20s. For a long time I suspected there was a dietary link, as heavy stress would result in days diarrhea. Also had a bunch of other symptoms like silent reflux (that wore down my tooth enamel), frequent brain fog, food coma feeling after lunch some days, eczema, and arthritic pain.

The reflux eventually became chronic causing throat pain, and after not being content to just treat the symptoms with stomach acid blockers, I found some anecdotes on Internet forums that it could be the symptoms of food intolerances so I tried elimination dieting.

After a few months all my health problems began to fade, and after narrowing down and removing the trigger foods, they all resolved - no more brain fog, no more reflux, no more arthritis, and no more anxiety!

The last one is amazing, because anxiety up to that point was just the background noise of my life. The constant pit in the stomach, and adrenal exhaustion. The wild fight or flight response in any stressful situation.

I now know what “normal” feels like and it’s amazing! Genuine peace.

If you have anxiety or depression, I cannot recommend enough investigating into whether food intolerances might be the cause.

Edit - to answer some of the questions below:

My elimination diet was very strict at the start - I cut the foods I ate down to a few staples (oats, eggs, pea protein powder, rice, tuna, salmon, bananas, apples, water) until the reflux and gut pain died down, then stuck with it for a few months longer to give my gut some time to heal before starting to reintroduce different foods again. I probably would have added bone broth to the mix if I ate chicken/beef as I've read that is good for healing a damaged gut.

The annoying thing about food intolerances is that unlike allergies there's usually no immediate reaction, and sometimes it can take days or weeks of eating something before the symptoms start to become noticeable and the cycle of chronic inflammation kicks into overdrive again.

That made it quite a slow process to narrow down the culprits - it took about a year and a half of introducing and removing things to narrow them down, but the foods that trigger the inflammation cycle for me are: dairy (not only lactose, but the dairy proteins, dairy fat, and includes goat milk and other animal milks), gluten (wheat, barley, rye), amaranth, millet, and sorghum.

Soy doesn't seem to cause any gut pain or reflux for me, but does causes pain and inflammation of my thyroid, so I avoid that too.

On the grain side, I can tolerate oats, corn, rice, quinoa, buckwheat (it's a seed, not related to wheat), and a few other exotic grains like Teff just fine.

Early on in the elimination dieting process there were other foods that would set off gut pain and reflux - citrus, tomatoes, caffeine (tea, coffee, cocoa) being some of them - but now that my gut has healed I've noticed I can eat them regularly again and things are fine.

It's been about 5 years now since I fixed my gut and it's amazing how all of the spiraling health problems I was facing have cleared up completely. Even though it does suck not to be able to enjoy things like dairy ice-cream, French pastries, pizza, and the convenience of not having to scour menus before choosing a place to eat out, thankfully there are a lot of gluten free and dairy free options nowadays, and it's all worth it to have good health again!