Vitamin D Changed My Life
I Was Run Down, Had Pains in My Legs and Was Severely Overweight
In early 2019, I was struggling. At just 36, I had pains in my legs and couldn’t do more than 30 minutes of housework without sitting down in pain. My head felt foggy, I felt wiped out all the time, and something wasn’t right.
I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. — Bilbo Baggins
It was starting to affect my job; I was becoming forgetful, and getting motivated to go to meetings was becoming a problem. After months of struggling through that fog, I went to see the doctor. What she told me changed my life.
It had been going on for a long time.
I’ve written previously about living in Scandinavia; they experience long, dark winters where you can go for months without seeing the sun. I had undoubtedly felt significant dips in energy, and months where I feel like I wasn’t in control. In hindsight, I think I had been deficient in Vitamin D for almost 20 years.
I was severely overweight, up to 375 pounds at my heaviest, and I spent the majority of my time sitting inside. I would mainly sit on the sofa or working at my desk. My only exercise was travel related to my job, primarily walking through airports or train stations.
So in February 2019, I sat down in the doctor’s office and explained my symptoms. She immediately said that she suspected it could be Vitamin D deficiency. The doctor explained that during winter because of the lack of sun and the western diet, most people don’t get enough vitamin D naturally. We feel good during the summer because we maybe get to the point where we’re not severely deficient, but then during the winter, we may reach a critical point where our vitamin D levels dip below. We slip from feeling ok to feeling awful.
She wanted to do a few blood tests to confirm, and also explained that there could be other reasons. Given my size, she checked my blood glucose levels, thyroid and B12 levels.
The blood test confirmed what she suspected. My vitamin D levels were 12nmol/L; a healthy level should be more than 50nmol/L.
I was severely deficient.
Background on Vitamin D
When most people think of Vitamins, they can generally name things like Iron, Calcium, Vitamin C etc. Most people don’t understand what they are in reality.
For the more technical minded, Vitamin D is a hormone produced in the kidneys. You can get it through natural production in your body after exposure to sunlight; you can also ingest it through food or supplementation.
It helps your body absorb calcium and also acts to reduce inflammation, supports glucose metabolism, cell growth and many other functions affecting your whole body.
The NIH produces a fact sheet for Vitamin D.
The road back to feeling normal
Once confirmed, the doctor prescribed a high dose for a few weeks to get my levels back to normal. She advised that I continue to take a Vitamin D supplement, as is the new recommended NHS guideline in the UK.
Within two weeks, I felt like I could conquer the world again. Looking back, I was still was feeling the effects of being deficient for a long time after the initial treatment.
I wanted to improve my health further, and work had started on building a new gym in my town. So I planned to join as soon as it opened. In the end, it took so long that I joined my current gym, where I have lost 170 pounds so far.
In hindsight, I believe it had been going on for a long time. As a teenager I felt that I had gone off a cliff between the age of 16 and 18, I know many teenagers feel this way, but it was noticeable in my exam performance and generally how I felt. I think that was the first time I started experiencing Vitamin D deficiency.
I am not a health professional, so my recommendation would always be to see a doctor. In my case, a simple, treatable deficiency had cost me years of productivity and feeling good.
