Does Vitamin D Play Role in Weight Loss?

Vitamin D. It seems that everywhere you turn you are now reading how this once little talked about, almost shunned vitamin is the end all, be all when it comes to the vitamins that you should have in your health cabinet.  Vitamin D, especially Vitamin D3, has been identified as a vitamin that is vital to the health of your bones, calcium absorption, cancer prevention since it helps to prevent the division of irregular cells and out of control cell growth, and also now it has been implicated in the control of your insulin levels.

Because of this link to your insulin levels and keeping level blood sugar, vitamin D is now also linked to the ease of losing and keeping weight off, and maintaining a healthy weight. For this and many other health reasons, it has caused many health professionals to cry foul on those that recommend total avoidance of the sun and slathering of chemical-laden sunscreens every time you venture out into the sun.

The sun is the primary source of prime Vitamin D absorption and provides you with the best source of vitamin D you can get. No supplement can rival this perfect form of this vitamin, but it can certainly help boost your vitamin D levels. While the link to weight loss has not been studied a whole lot, there is some anecdotal evidence that boosting vitamin D levels may help one to lose weight that previously has had a really hard time of it.

While older recommendations for prime vitamin D levels were pretty conservative, new calls for levels between 2,000 to 4,000 IU’s of the vitamin are now considered to be ideal.  This means that most people in the US are probably deficient in this vitamin.  Ideally, you should get this vitamin from the sun, which is really hard if either you have very darkly pigmented skin and do not absorb a whole lot of the UVB rays that the sun puts off, which generate vitamin D in the skin, or if you are very fair and are afraid you will burn in the sun.

You just want to make sure you do NOT burn. That is when the real damage happens.  Apparently if you get just a tad slight bit pink, that means that you have gotten enough sun to start the process of vitamin D processing and assimilation into the blood stream. Also, when you do get sun, make sure you don’t wash your exposed skin for as long as possible. Your skin makes the vitamin D from the sun, and then you absorb it slowly over the next several hours. So when you shower prematurely, you are essentially “washing off” vitamin D!

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