Wow, I'm glad I found this thread so I don't feel like such a winter wimp. I used to kind of hate summer and love winter (good thing since I live in Michigan). But over the last 7 months I've shed 80 pounds, and I can't beleive how cold I am this winter! Being a science nerd, I was doing some reading in the medical literature about influcences of insulin resistance/metabolic syndrome and the sympathetic nervous system and hypothalamus/limbic systems (both of which are instrumental in thermoregulation). Although not totally accepted as mainstream these authors laid out a good basis for the connection which I could totally buy into as I saw the changes they were describing happening in my own body. I clearly had an overactive sympathetic nervous system (sweating, gag reflex, anxiety, etc), and I clearly had metabolic syndrome (high bp, abdominal fat, high triglyceride/HDL ratio). ALL of those things have gone away since I changed my diet, started eating reasonably (including really cutting back...but not out...alcohol), started exercising, and of course lost all the weight.
So, while there may be some loss of insulative capacity, I'm pretty convinced that it's more of a shift in the way your body is working. It no longer has to deal with the enormous amount of LDL and tryglyceride, which it would do by metabolizing with a loss of energy as heat.
I only hope that I'm not as miserable as I used to be when summer gets here
I also have to apologize to my wife for dismissing her complaints about being cold all the time. For some reason, she's not all that sympathetic to me when I complain lately
Peace
Dave