If you feel nothing, no emotion or no sensation in the body then that is also a felt emotion in the body as a lack of feeling.
So, three inputs.
Energy input as food/drink, how fast you breathe in. Energy output as what you do in the world and how much your muscles exert themselves.
The third input to your body is your stress response as interrupted by your brain. Stress in this case can be pain and discomfort, but also any other input or thought from your senses.
Your body doesn't know that a lion jumping out of the grass is terrifying, it just responds to your brain throwing terror seeds at it.
Your body doesn't know that seeing "23 53 34 78 and bonus number 5" means you just won the Powerball lottery, it's just responds to the your brain throwing happiness seeds at it.
Like you said, mental health can be systemic, but having bad inputs can stress you out as well. If your problem is mainly bad inputs, then you can control your response, just in a loose way rather than a tight way that we humans seem to prefer.
but you're still right, our own guts are what I had to look at in order to deal with this illness.