Difficulty losing weight caused by Vitamin D Deficiency

Vitamin D deficiency may be preventing you from losing weight. Few people (your trainer, Doctor, et. al.) are aware of this relationship. Educate yourself.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/health/25brody.html?_r=2
http://www.womentowomen.com/healthynutrition/vitamind.aspx
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/QAA400683/Vitamin-D-Deficient.html
http://www.vitaminddeficiencysymptomsguide.com/vitamin-d-and-weight-loss/
Here’s my story.
I am very fit 42-year- old, Caucasian female who over three years, while working out religiously and intensely, grew to be 40lbs overweight; all my numbers other than my weight, were and remain fantastic, BP excellent, cholesterol excellent, RHR 46 ... all good. I have extremely healthy workout and eating habits. In fact, in the three years that I gained this weight my cholesterol levels dropped slightly as I improved my eating habits in an effort to lose weight.

I tried everything to lose weight without being able to get more than a few lbs off. The only unusual things I noticed in this time was that I began to have INTENSE sugar cravings and I seemed to fatigue easily and have greatly decreased energy. Things I used to love doing simply exhausted me much sooner or I got tired just thinking about doing them. I just seemed to be slowing down, but it was very subtle and when I mentioned it to people they attributed it to "you're getting older". I felt like it was more than that, but it was so subtle, I couldn’t pin it down.

I am an ACSM certified personal trainer and trained and have lost weight successfully in the past, so I know how hard it can be, but the more I worked out the LESS I lost. I had my metabolism tested, nothing there. I moved to a new town where I walked and biked everywhere (didn’t even own a car) and I signed on with reputable personal trainer 3x weekly . I lost body fat but over 6 months of training, the scale did not budge more than 5 lbs. Neither I nor my trainer could understand what was wrong, so I started going to Doctors. I went to my OBGYN, General Practitioner and finally and Endocrinologist.

They ruled out all the usual culprits, Thyroid, adrenal issues, PCOS, Cushing's syndrome, pre-diabetes, etc. at this point, I was losing my mind because in addition to the frustration of dieting religiously and working out with a personal trainer and own my own nothing was happening and the doctors really did not seem interested in getting to the bottom of it and it was pretty clear they assumed I was simply not working hard enough, so they weren't motivated to dig deeper.

I resigned myself to the fact that no one believed me and because I had no “real” health issues, everyone thought it was some failure on my part. The last Dr. I saw was an endocrinologist who, reluctantly, ran some tests, although she told me point blank "it could be anything" and didn't seem to care. She called me with my test results said everything was normal - no explanation for my weight gain and inability to lose weight. In passing she mentioned, that my Vitamin D was low 24 ng/mL. She said the range was 30 ng/mL -80. She advised me to take a supplement of 1000 IU of D3 per day.

She did not correlate this deficiency to my weight problems. I did some research on my own. There is a high correlation between obesity and Vitamin D deficiency and the ranges are being raised to redefine normal as being between 50-80 ng/mL, not 30-80 ng/mL as the Dr. noted. When my problems began, I had just moved to a state where you get NO vitamin D from the sun in the winter -- If you live north of the latitude of Atlanta, Georgia, the sun is not high enough in the sky half of the year to stimulate vitamin D production in the skin. And if you do, be aware that absorption if VitD and it is blocked by sunscreen, so with the increase in skin cancer awareness and prevention, people are often blocking the Vitamin D they might otherwise get.
Because I was quite deficient based on the 50-80 scale, I started taking 7000 UI of D3 (not D2). The effect was immediate and positive, my energy levels immediately rose and I started dropping weight off my hips and stomach where is would not BUDGE for three years.

There are few if any experts in this area, but you can get tested and do your own research. Some of the basic guidelines are that it’s safe to take 1000 IU per 25lbs of body weight and do not take more than 10,000 IU per day it can cause toxicity of you take too much. Don’t expect your doctor to know much about this issue, educate yourself on reputable websites and elsewhere. Three out of 4 people are Vitamin D deficient and over time this can contribute to heart disease, depression, fatigue and is Vit D is important calcium absorption, so it is also contributing to rickets in children and osteoporosis in adults. Some theorize that Vitamin D deficiency may be contributing to the obesity epidemic in the US.

I am not an expert this is just my experience and I hope it is useful and will shorten the duration of someone else who is experiencing the same intense frustration I did for several years.