Skip to main content

Vitamin D: Prana in a Pill?

Do people forget what it feels like to be well? I think so. While I was sick with a sinus infection, I remembered running around with my best friend last year, going dancing two or three times a week, and wondered how I ever had the energy to do all that. This morning, I woke up feeling healthy (even though I'm still coughing a little, and still taking Mucinex since I'm really afraid of a relapse). I got up at 6:30 (can't remember the last time I was up that early on a weekend), did some laundry, cleaned out the refrigerator, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher, changed the sheets, took out the trash, bought some groceries and got to work around 10. Concentrating on my work was so much easier than it was when I was sick. (That it was Saturday helped, too.)

I still have some symptoms of vitamin D toxicity. No vomiting, but I've had some momentary but severe acid reflux. I'd forgotten how painful that is. Nevertheless, I'm feeling better than I have in months.

My mother felt a cold coming on yesterday and started taking 50,000 IU of vitamin D per the SWAMP treatment plan. She'd felt listless for quite some time due to an infection, but it's been cleared up for awhile now. When she took a vitamin D test a few months ago, her level was 40--the low end of normal, and below optimal. For reasons I don't understand, her get-up-and-go returned when she took the high dose of vitamin D.

ETA: Dr. Davis noticed octagenarians, like my mother, renewing their energy with vitamin D back in 2007.

Comments

FredT said…
Any big dose vitamin or mineral does wonders if we are deficient, but not much positive if we are not deficient. I tried some of the other common frequently sub-clinical deficiencies, iodine, magnesium, Vit C and B. All had a small impact, so I stayed on a small dose of those, as well as D.
Lori Miller said…
Agreed--magnesium and zinc made a big difference for me. What I've started wondering is if an infection or other illness can make a person burn through a lot of vitamin D and leave them deficient and feeling under par.

Popular posts from this blog

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...