The year is nearly over, and you could tell somebody in one sentence what it took out of you. A parent who needed more than you had to give. A diagnosis in the family. A move, a job that ended, or a long stretch of months where you were the one everybody called.
You are eating well through all of it. That is the part people have trouble believing. The salad gets made. The greens are in the refrigerator. And you are still worn out by three in the afternoon in a way you were not two years ago, and you are finishing about two-thirds of what you used to put on a plate, and none of it feels like progress.
Women are saying this out loud in the places where they talk to each other first. I am fed up with how little I can eat now. I just eat for comfort. Nobody believes me when I say the food is not the problem.
What Cortisol Was Built To Do
Cortisol has a daily shape to it, and the shape is part of how we are made.
It starts climbing before you are awake. A 2025 review in Endocrine Reviews describes the circadian peak arriving shortly after waking, with free salivary cortisol rising somewhere between fifty and a hundred and fifty-six percent in the first thirty to forty-five minutes of the day. Then it comes down in two stages across the hours and reaches its low point at night.
That rise is what gets you out of bed and into the morning. The fall is what lets you sleep. A body running the way it was designed to run does both, every day, without being asked.
What the same review reports about long strain is the part worth knowing. Under chronic stress that morning rise is blunted, and long adversity and poor health can narrow the whole day’s range. Flattened, in other words. The system built for a short emergency has been asked to hold a position for a year, and it answers by going quiet.
What a Hard Year Spends
A 2019 review in Advances in Nutrition gathered up what has actually been measured about psychological stress and the body’s store of minerals and vitamins.
Magnesium came out the clearest. Stress was associated with lower magnesium in the blood and more of it leaving in the urine. Students excreted more magnesium during examinations. Sleep restriction lowered magnesium inside red blood cells.
Zinc moved too, and faster than most people would guess. In Navy SEAL trainees put through five days of sustained stress, plasma zinc fell by thirty-three percent, and returned to where it started seven days afterward. Animal work suggests part of what happens is a shift of zinc within the body rather than a straight loss, held in the liver by a zinc-binding protein.
The author of that review is careful about how much weight the findings can carry: the studies are small, they use different kinds of stress for different lengths of time, and they measure differently from one another. He says plainly that firm conclusions cannot be drawn yet. That is worth knowing before anybody builds a program on it.
What is not in dispute is simpler. Minerals leave the body in urine, strain changes how much leaves, and whatever leaves has to be replaced out of food.
The Arithmetic Almost Nobody Does
Here is where two numbers move in opposite directions in the same year.
A woman over thirty is working toward 320 mg of magnesium a day, 8 mg of zinc, and 75 mg of vitamin C. Those figures hold through her fifties and sixties. They do not fall as her appetite does.
Meanwhile she is eating less. Not by decision, and not by much on any one day. A smaller supper here, skipping the thing she used to want at four o’clock there. Over a year it adds up to a noticeably smaller amount of food arriving, carrying a noticeably smaller amount of everything in it.
On a plant-based diet there is one more turn of the screw, and it is better to know it than not. Phytates in beans, nuts and whole grains bind zinc in the intestine and hold on to it, so zinc from plants is absorbed less readily than zinc from other sources. Soaking beans, grains and seeds before you cook them loosens that grip. It is a small habit with a real return.
And those daily figures describe a body that is already in good repair, holding a level. Most women reading this are not holding a level. They are coming out of a year that drew the stores down, after years of eating the way most of us were raised to eat. Filling a deficit takes more than maintaining one does, which is only how filling anything works. The number on the chart is a floor to stand on, not a target to reach for.
What the Design Already Accounted For
“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”
— Genesis 1:29
Look at how the provision is put together. The pumpkin seed that carries zinc carries magnesium with it. The greens that carry magnesium carry vitamin C, potassium and folate in the same handful. Nothing in the garden arrives as one isolated mineral in a measured dose. It arrives in company, in the proportions it grew in, which is the form the body knows how to work with.
The rest was accounted for as well. A day has an evening in it. A week has a Sabbath in it. The cortisol rhythm that a hard year flattens is the same rhythm that answers to going to bed and getting up — which makes sleep an input, the same way food is an input, rather than a reward you earn after the work is finished.
What Goes on a Smaller Plate
Food first, as always. Each of these answers one of the needs above, and you can buy all of it this week.
Pumpkin seeds, by the handful. One ounce carries 156 mg of magnesium, better than a third of the day’s figure, along with 2.2 mg of zinc. There is no other single thing on this list that does as much in as little room. Keep them where you will see them.
Greens, every day, in quantity. Kale, collards, bok choy, turnip greens. A half cup of cooked spinach brings 78 mg of magnesium. Broccoli and brussels sprouts bring vitamin C along with it.
Something red or orange and raw. A half cup of raw red pepper carries 95 mg of vitamin C, more than a full day’s figure on its own. An orange is 70 mg, a kiwifruit 64, a half cup of strawberries 49. Vitamin C is also a cofactor the adrenal cortex and the adrenal medulla both draw on, which puts it squarely in this conversation rather than off in the cold-season one.
Legumes, soaked and cooked. A half cup of lentils gives 1.3 mg of zinc, black beans 60 mg of magnesium. A cup of cooked oats brings 2.3 mg of zinc, the largest zinc figure on this page after the seeds.
Nuts and seeds beyond the pumpkin. Chia at 111 mg of magnesium an ounce, almonds at 80, cashews at 74 and carrying zinc as well. Ground flax, hemp seed and walnuts for the fats.
Two that never come off the plate. B12 is the one nutrient this way of eating does not supply, and the answer is a supplement rather than a change to the food. Check your B12 every two to three years, and sooner if the tiredness is the loudest thing. Vitamin D comes from sunlight on skin, and from a supplement through the winter months when a northern sky cannot make any.
If the appetite closes earlier than it used to, the order matters as much as the list. Put the raw vegetables in front of the cooked plate rather than beside it. Whatever goes in first is what the body actually got. This is also where fresh vegetable juice earns its place in a season like this one — it carries a large volume of minerals and enzymes past a stomach that is not up to a large volume of food, while the whole foods and their fiber carry waste back out. Both jobs matter, so neither one replaces the other. Having the greens ready on the day you do not feel like making them solves more of this than any single food does.
Where Supplements Fit
Toward the back, where they belong. The foundation is what is on the plate and in the glass, and no capsule makes up for a year of thin food.
Within that, a few things earn a place. BarleyMax sits closer to the food side of the line than the supplement side — barley and alfalfa grass juice with the water taken out, dried at low temperature so the enzymes survive. It goes in a glass and takes about thirty seconds on the mornings when nobody has the strength to run a juicer.
If you would rather learn to judge any of this for yourself, we wrote out what to look for in a whole-food supplement and how the popular ones compare. And if the fatigue is the loudest part of the whole picture, start with why you are so tired rather than with an aisle.
Questions We Hear Most Often
Q: What does cortisol actually do to me after a long stretch of stress?
A: Cortisol follows a daily curve — rising before you wake, peaking in the first half hour or so of the morning, falling across the day, lowest at night. A 2025 review in Endocrine Reviews reports that the morning rise is blunted under chronic stress, and that long adversity can narrow the whole day’s range. A flatter curve is a different thing to live inside than a curve with a real morning in it.
Q: Does stress really use up minerals, or is that a supplement company’s line?
A: Some of it has been measured. A 2019 review in Advances in Nutrition found stress associated with lower blood magnesium and higher urinary magnesium, and recorded a thirty-three percent drop in plasma zinc in Navy SEAL trainees across five hard days. The same review calls the overall evidence limited and uneven, and says firm conclusions cannot be drawn yet. Taking the minerals seriously is reasonable. Building a protocol on them is not.
Q: I am eating better than I ever have. Why am I still worn out?
A: Two things can be true in the same year. The quality of the food went up, and the quantity came down, and the second one is easy to miss because nothing about it looks like a mistake. Raise what each bite carries and a smaller appetite is simply a smaller appetite. If your bloodwork also came back fine, that is worth reading about on its own.
Q: Where does zinc come from if I do not eat animal foods?
A: Pumpkin seeds first, then cooked oats, lentils, other legumes, cashews and hemp seeds. Soak beans, grains and seeds before cooking, which loosens the phytates that bind zinc in the intestine and leaves more of it available to you.
Q: How much magnesium and zinc should I be getting?
A: A woman over thirty is working toward 320 mg of magnesium and 8 mg of zinc a day. Read those as the amount it takes to hold steady in a body already in good repair. Coming back from a depleted year asks for more than holding steady does.
Q: Should I take this to somebody?
A: If you want a second set of eyes on the whole picture, a nutritionally minded health care professional is the right kind of help — somebody who will look at what you are eating and how you are sleeping, not only at what a panel says. Bring the year with you when you go. It is the most useful thing you will say in the appointment.
Where to Begin
Start by adding rather than by taking away. When appetite is the thing in short supply, the question worth asking is which foods do the most with the room you have.
Before that, though, it helps to know what the room is for. Your body is rebuilding itself right now, at a scale that is hard to picture — and it builds with whatever materials are on hand on the day the work is done. We put that on one page: what renews in days, what takes decades, and what is never replaced at all.
And if you would like to see what a whole day of this looks like before changing anything, we wrote that out too.
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Sources
- Stalder T, Oster H, Abelson JL, Huthsteiner K, Klucken T, Clow A. “The Cortisol Awakening Response: Regulation and Functional Significance.” Endocrine Reviews, 2025;46(1):43–59. academic.oup.com/edrv/article/46/1/43/7739741
- Lopresti AL. “The Effects of Psychological and Environmental Stress on Micronutrient Concentrations in the Body: A Review of the Evidence.” Advances in Nutrition, 2019;11(1):103–112. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7442351
- Patak P, Willenberg HS, Bornstein SR. “Vitamin C Is an Important Cofactor for Both Adrenal Cortex and Adrenal Medulla.” Endocrine Research, 2004;30(4):871–875. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1081/ERC-200044126
- National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements. “Magnesium — Health Professional Fact Sheet.” ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Magnesium-HealthProfessional
- National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements. “Zinc — Health Professional Fact Sheet.” ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Zinc-HealthProfessional
- National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements. “Vitamin C — Health Professional Fact Sheet.” ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminC-HealthProfessional
