Three Things Every Dieter Needs to Know About Vitamin B6 Injections and Weight Loss

Vitamin B6 injections are promoted as a way for losing weight faster while on a diet. The reason vitamin B6 is important to dieters is that it helps promote muscle growth even while dieters are trying to lose fat.

Losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time is, to say the least, difficult, but working out hard and eating enough protein and carbohydrates, without eating too many calories, may make this possible. You can't gain muscle if you aren't feeding your muscles a minimum, of course.

Vitamin B6 helps muscles incorporate amino acids to build them stronger, harder, and bigger after you work out. Vitamin B6 helps your body use the glycogen stored in your liver as a fuel during your work out, and helps you with your initial, fast 3 to 4 pounds (1.5 to 2 kilos) of weight loss.

If you are deficient in vitamin B6 and you take vitamin B6 injections, weight loss will come easier. But there is just one precaution for serious dieters:

It's really rare for anyone to have any side effects from vitamin B6, although doses as low as 500 milligrams a day can cause problems. These problems are worse then the recipient of the high-dose B6 therapy is on a low-protein diet.

If you have had a gastric bypass or gastroplasty, this means that the days you fill up on salad or a starchy food or a dessert and don't get your protein, high vitamin B6 levels could cause some problems with breathing, or perhaps stinging and burning in your fingers and toes. Or maybe you would just experience numbness in your fingers and toes.

There is another kind of neuropathy you really don't want to have while you are dieting. It's called gastroparesis. It's a slow-down of the conduction of nerve signals through the vagus nerve, that controls how fast food passes through your stomach.

Not only does gastroparesis make you feel bloated, it slows down the passage of food through your small intestine. Your small intestine is stretched, and your pancreas gets a signal to (1) increase insulin production to store any digested sugars as fat and (2) increase glucagon production to release sugar from liver just in case you really didn't have a lot of sugar coming from your meal.

The extra insulin quickly stores any extra calories as fat. The extra glucagon empties your emergency energy supplies in the liver so you are hungry again. These aren't happy outcomes for dieters, and they can happen after just one day of taking an extremely high dose of B6.

On the other hand, just one day without taking high-dose vitamin B6 will quickly reverse the problem.

Vitamin B6 injections are fine for helping you lose weight if you are eating fewer calories so your body burns fat. They help your muscles use the amino acids released from the protein foods you eat. But they are not a good idea if you have had a gastric bypass, or if you are on a strictly vegan raw foods diet. In those cases, take your supplemental B6 as a liquid vitamin.

• Expensive Procedures Made Unnecessary Just By Taking a Vitamin
• Vitamin B6 and Morning Sickness - Six Tips for Preventing Morning Sickness
• Vitamin B6 Deficiency - The Pharmaceutical Side Effect Your Doctor May Not Tell You About
• Three Things Parents Need to Know