Intro to Swaying LIBRARY - General Swaying Info Found HERE

[atomic sagebrush]

Diet options for swaying original here:http://genderdreaming.com/forum/gend...s-swaying.html

On this site, there is no "right" or "wrong" way to sway and no one "official" diet. We present data from various sources, and then it is up to each individual to make up their minds about what diet is best for them and what makes the most sense to them.

However, since some of these diets are a bit contradictory, it is leading to some confusion so let's do a quick comparison of the various diets (and a few other ones just for fun!)

1) The French Gender Diet - based on the idea that mineral ratios and not any other factors (cal/mag for girls, sodium and potassium for boys) sway gender. Somewhat restrictive. More info is available in these threads http://genderdreaming.com/forum/show...t-Introduction and in the Dream Member Private forum (you must be a Dream Member to access this forum) http://genderdreaming.com/forum/foru...-PRIVATE-FORUM

2)The IG-Style diet: This diet is found on the In-Gender site at Trying to conceive a girl? Read this! .... Last updated 8/11 - In-Gender.com (for pink) and Trying to conceive a boy? Read this! ... Last updated 8/11 - In-Gender.com (for blue) It encorporates ideas from the French Gender Diet, the acid/alkaline diet, and a few other diets. It is highly restrictive and may be difficult for people to follow in the long term.

3)The Trivers-Willard-style diet or "High-Everything" for boys, "Low-Everything" for girls. This is based on the idea that when food is plentiful, your body is more likely to conceive a boy and when food is scarcer, you are more likely to conceive a girl. It is somewhat restrictive, but there is more flexibility to this diet than the others. Info about this diet is found here http://genderdreaming.com/forum/show...ard-hypothesis
http://genderdreaming.com/forum/show...s-for-TTC-Pink (for pink) and http://genderdreaming.com/forum/show...estions-Part-1 (for blue)

The complete High Everything, Low Everything Diets plus recipes, food guides, meal plans, etc are available for Dream Members - to become a Dream Member, scroll to the top of this page and click the big pink button!

ETA - I am actually making a 3rd diet now, called the "In-Betweeners" Diet, for pink swayers who don't want to cut back to the LE Diet, and for blue swayers who are vegetarians, but I haven't posted it yet.

4)Acid/Alkaline diet - based on the idea that being very acidic sways pink and being very alkaline sways blue. This is not a specific swaying diet but people have used it as part of a sway attempt (and the IG-style diet is partially based on this premise). Less restrictive than some of the other diets. Diets and info is available at many places online but here are a few to start with Alkaline Foods & Alkaline Diet http://www.energiseforlife.com/wordp...et-simplified/ http://altmedicine.about.com/od/popu...kalinediet.htm

5)Vegetarian/Vegan for TTC pink - A vegetarian/vegan diet seems to sway pink - although this is not a swaying diet per se and it is very possible to conceive boys even if you are vegetarian, it may be a good choice for people who have a hard time sticking to other diets. http://genderdreaming.com/forum/show...for-more-girls

6) The Caveman or Paleolithic Diet for Blue -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet This is not a swaying diet per se, but is instead based on the idea that we should eat like our ancient ancestors, mostly meats and vegetables with little to no refined carbohydrates. http://www.cavemanpower.com/food/cav...ower_diet.html INTRODUCTION TO THE PALEOLITHIC DIET http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/od/pal...eodietfood.htm

7)Atkins, South Beach, and other low-carb diets - There have been mixed results with both boys and girls conceived while people were following these diets. Until more is known, it's probably best to avoid being on a very low-carb diet while TTC if for no other reason than it may not be safe for a baby.

8)General weight loss diets such as Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, etc. These have seemed to help some people sway pink. Weight loss and reducing calories does seem to help with a pink sway.

So how do you decide what diet is right for you? You will find foods that are ok on some diets that are not ok on others (don't panic, that doesn't mean that the diet doesn't sway, it may sway differently). Some have a lot of evidence to back them up and others have very little. One may just make "sense" to you on a gut level, when you think about how you ate before conceiving your other children. But most importantly you may find that one of the diets fits in better with your lifestyle than another does. If this is the case, then that's the diet for you. It does NO good killing yourself trying to follow a diet that you hate - either you'll cheat or you'll risk ruining your sway by increasing your stress level.

Not saying even a little bit that anyone should throw diet out the window when things get a little tough, because diet is one of the things that has the most evidence supporting it, but if you really truly find that you cannot follow the diet you are on, if it is ruining your life, your health, or giving you tons of stress and aggravation, it's time to stop and choose a new one.

There IS no one size, fits all swaying diet - both boys and girls have been conceived while their parents were eating a wide variety of food. It's my hope that everyone looks at the various diets and chooses the one that feels right for them. Please read http://genderdreaming.com/forum/show...magic+foods%27 and http://genderdreaming.com/forum/show...ule-of-swaying!

[atomic sagebrush]

Complete guide to taking supplements!

I don't necessarily advise taking all these supps (esp. for a pink sway) but this is meant to be directions of HOW to take them for those who WANT to take them.

There is no hard and fast rule about the best time of day to take supplements. First and foremost, take them when it makes sense for you...if they make you sick in the morning, don't take them in the morning. If it's too much to remember the optimal times to take them, take them whenever it works for you. Many people find taking pills of any kind as part of a routine makes it easier to remember. If you always do the same things at the same time every day (like taking your child to preschool or the office coffee break) that's the perfect time for taking your supplements.

Supplements can cause stomach upset or a jittery feeling, especially when taken on an empty stomach. They're not always absorbed best when taken on an empty stomach anyway. For best results, take vitamins after eating a meal containing fat. (If you just ate a huge meal, sometimes it is really difficult to choke down a bunch of pills and water on top of that as I learned to my very great dismay )

Take supplements one at a time with a LOT of water. Resist the temptation to swallow a big handful of pills at once and if you ever have the feeling that they are lodged in your throat, try eating a piece of bread and butter to wash it down with. DON'T ignore this feeling, if it doesn't get better right away consult a doctor. On another website, a man gave himself a perforated esophagus by swallowing a bunch of vitamins dry - they got stuck and dissolved in his throat and ate through his esophagus.

Just to complicate matters, some foods can also interfere with/encourage absorption of some vitamins and mineral supplements. We'll take these special cases one at a time.

CALCIUMCalcium is best absorbed with acid. Either stomach acid (so take it after a meal, when your stomach is producing extra acid) or the acids in fruit juice. You also need to take magnesium (do not take more than 300 mg Magnesium in supplement form) and Vit. D for your body to best utilize calcium (This is for general health - for swaying, it's not entirely clear whether we want calcium to be absorbed into our bones or floating around in our system.)

Things that block the absorbtion of calcium include caffeine in coffee, tea, soft drinks; excessive protein, especially animal-based proteins; refined sugar and corn syrup; recreational drugs such as alcohol and cigarettes, too little or too much exercise; high salt diet; the Solanum genus of vegetables – tomatoes, potatoes, aubergines/eggplants, peppers - a chemical in them blocks calcium absorption.

FOLIC ACID and other B vitamins Of course, everyone swaying should take at minimum 400 mcg of folic acid. The B vitamins are water soluble vitamins and your body uses what it needs at the moment and excretes the rest. To get the most out of them, you should take smaller doses at several times during the day.

To best absorb B vitamins, you should take them along with Vit. C (see below) and with other B vitamins. Excess alcohol consumption and birth control pills can interfere with folic acid absorption, as can green tea and high salt intake. The TTC boy diet and baking soda drinks are particularly hard on your folic acid levels and ALL blue swayers should be taking extra folic acid - minimum of 2000 mcg.

VITAMIN C Another water-soluble vitamin that is excreted when taken in excess. For best results take smaller doses several times a day. Treat cranberry like Vitamin C.

POTASSIUMSince having too much (or too little) potassium can KILL you, it's probably best to get potassium primarily through diet. (potassium is in practially EVERYTHING but esp. fruits and vegetables) If you do want to take a little potassium, start very small (it is sold in dosages that are only 1-3% of the DMV for potassium. Take one with each meal and watch for any weird symptoms like diarrhea or arrhythmia. Salt, caffeine, antibiotics, and licorice can deplete your body of potassium, but still, it's best to just eat more fruits and vegetables rather than load up on potassium supplements.

IRONThis is not something we talk about a lot in swaying, but iron is a good part of a blue sway. You don't need to take extra iron, you can absorb it better through diet anyway and you will be eating extra red meat and fortified breakfast cereal Tannins in tea can block absorption of iron, as does caffeine, eggs, milk, and large amounts of fiber. Vitamin C enhances iron absorption, as do fermented foods. And of course the trusty ACV drink!!

HERBS I have no evidence to support this but I think the delicate compounds in herbs are probably more effective when taken on an empty
stomach if you can stand it.

This advice doesn't work as well for blue swayers because they need to be eating a lot all day long, but if you take the herbs with a snack rather than a meal, it may help.

FAT SOLUBLE VITAMINS Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat soluble - they can be stored in your fat and used whenever your body needs them, and are best absorbed with a meal that contains some fat in it. Vitamin A can actually be quite dangerous to take in supplement form, so it's much better to get Vit. A through diet (it's safe when eaten in food form). All yellow-orange fruits and vegetables contain some Vitamin A.

Vitamin D, most of us probably do not get anywhere near enough of, so it should be taken in supplement form. Research indicates you cannot OD on Vitamin D in anything less than 10,000 IU (which is a LOT of Vit. D). You should take your Vit. D with your biggest meal (with the most fat in it) for best absorption. For best results, also eat something with a lot of Vit. A in it, like carrots or V-8 juice.

Vit. E should be taken at the same time as Vit. D and also with a food that contains Vit. A like carrots or V-8 juice. You can get too much Vit. E, so stick to the government recommendations on that. If you are taking anything that thins your blood, such as aspirin, cranberry, garlic, fish oil, or prescription drug thinners, you should probably avoid Vit. E as it may cause bleeding.

Vit. K is actually manufactured by good bacteria that live in your intestines, so no need to take it. If you have recently taken antibiotics or even if you haven't, taking probiotics can help restore/maintain these helpful organisms. Take probiotics after eating because otherwise the acids in your stomach will kill most of them off.

Iron and fiber can block absorption of fat-soluble vitamins so be sure to take them at a different times of day.

OIL BASED SUPPLEMENTSFish oil, flaxseed, evening primrose oil, should be treated as fat soluble vitamins.

FIBER Blue swayers, if you choose to take fiber, do it first thing in the morning with a big glass of water and don't take it when you take any vitamins. Fiber doesn't seem to upset the stomach like other vitamins/minerals do. But you do not NEED to take fiber for your sway and you should be eating lots of fruits and vegetables and ample whole grains that will give you plenty of fiber anyway. You may want to time your intake of fat-soluble supplements at a time of day when you haven't eaten a large amount of fiber.

Pink swayers, you WANT the fiber to absorb and remove fat, so you should take a fiber supplement with every meal.

GRAPEFRUIT Grapefruit can interfere with the absorption of certain nutrients. So if you (blue swayers) are drinking grapefruit juice to increase CM, make sure you take it by itself.

PROTEINThis is not a supplement per se, but for blue swayers remember you are trying to up your protein intake. Protein is digested best when eaten in smallish amounts several times a day, because your body can only digest 30 grams or so at one meal. Break up your protein intake into several chunks and try to get as much in as you can.

Pink swayers should avoid protein and try to only eat about 40 grams a day.



Sample schedule for pink swayers - SKIP breakfast. Take 2-400 mcg of folic acid with or without other B vitamins. Take your herbs if you can stomach them without food. This is a good time of day to have some delectable Crystal Light as well.

With lunch, take cranberry/Vit C, 2-400 mcg folic acid, B complex, calcium/magnesium, Vit D (not saying you SHOULD take all these, just what the timing would be if you wanted to.). Probiotic after eating.

Midafternoon - more folic acid, B-complex, cran/Vit. C with snack if you absolutely must and fiber (taking the fiber at this point gives the Vit D. time to be digested without being absorbed by the fiber.)

With dinner, take FA, B, cranberry/Vit C, cal/mag and fiber.

Before bed, take another round of cranberry/vit C, FA/B, and then more herbs, then go to bed and sleep in case your stomach gets upset. The downside to this is that Vit C and B vitamins can make you a little wigged out and may make it hard to sleep - if this is true you will have to adjust to see what works best for you.

Sample schedule for blue swayers - With your hearty breakfast containing at least 30 grams of protein and some fat, you should take 400 mcg Folic Acid, a Vitamin D if desired, a tiny amount of potassium, and eat some fruits/vegetables that contain Vit. A. You can take Vit. C and B complex as well and ~I~ think blue swayers should take these, but some people think they sway pink.

Midmorning snack - 400 mcg FA and as much protein as you can. Eat another Vit. A rich fruit/vegetable or two. Vit C and B if desired. Take herbs here. This is also a great opportunity to try a brewer's yeast drink (brewer's yeast has protein and B vitamins and you can count this in your daily total)

Lunch - 30 grams protein, 400 mcg FA, and half your oily supplements. Vit. C and B if desired. Probiotic after eating. Tiny amount of potassium.

Midafternoon snack - as much protein as you can, 400 mcg Folic Acid, Vit. C and B if desired. Take herbs here. Brewer's yeast drink if you want.

Dinner - 30 grams protein, 400 mcg FA, the other half of the oily supplements. Vit. B and C if desired. Tiny amount of potassium.

These are just examples of plans that you can come up with, I hope everyone shares what has worked best for them!!!

ETA - When I mentioned above to eat "as much protein as you can" with your snacks, I don't mean eat unlimited protein, stick with the 30 grams or less. My point is that you don't HAVE to eat as much protein with snacks as you do with meals, you can eat less protein if you are not very hungry, just eat as much as you can within reason, without stuffing yourself, so if you ate 7 or 10 grams of protein, that's fine for a snack.

LINKS - http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_...ition/vitamins
http://genderdreaming.com/forum/show...3420#post13420

[atomic sagebrush]

the seasons and swaying (original found here http://genderdreaming.com/forum/gend...s-swaying.html)

The idea that males are more fragile than females and therefore more of them are conceived because more are lost, is at the root of much of gender swaying. 140-160 males are conceived for every 100 females, falling to 106 boys born for every 100 girls.

Scientists have known for some time that rates of conception of children of BOTH genders seem to vary by season and that this phenomenon varies depending on location. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1323571?log$=activity http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/976725?log$=activity Changes in the seasonal distribution of births in G... [Hum Biol. 1981] - PubMed - NCBI Previous studies have indicated that in Western Europe, October is the easiest month for conceiving, and April is the most difficult. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense because babies conceived in the fall months are born in summertime when the livin' is easy, whereas babies conceived in spring are born in the darkest months of winter and in the native environment were probably less likely to survive. For the good of the species, some mechanism that encourages more babies to be born when food is plentiful and they have a greater chance of survival, has apparently evolved at some point.

Dr. Angelo Cagnacci, an Italian researcher at the Policlinico of Modena (and his research team) set out to investigate this phenomenon and discovered something really amazing. In a study of over 14,000 births, in the Modena, Italy area, not only were conception rates lowest in March-May and highest from Sept.-November as previous research had indicated, but the gender ratio shifted during those periods as well.

More girls were conceived in the low-conception months of March-May, peaking in April (the ratio was 487 boys to 513 girls) More boys were conceived in the high-conception months of Sept-Nov, peaking in October. (535 boys and 465 girls). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...for-girls.html Keeping in mind that virtually everything that reduces fertility seems to sway pink and virtually everything that increases fertility seems to sway blue, it would appear that there is some sort of natural seasonal variation in fertility that also acts to sway in some fashion.

Why, then, are any boys born in the wintertime at all? Imagine if you will, a sort of continuum of fertility. All of us fall somewhere along this continuum, some of us more fertile and some of us less fertile; some get pregnant just by walking past their husand in the hallway and others have to try for many months in order to conceive and then everyone else falls somewhere in between. Highly fertile couples can probably conceive a baby boy to be born in wintertime with no problem at all, whereas less fertile couples may only be able to conceive a boy to be born in summertime (of course there are SO MANY variables at play that this would just be an overall tendency and obviously there would be MANY exceptions, this description is just meant to help envision what the real-world applications of such a mechanism might be)

Using this information in swaying is a bit tricky, because the evidence indicates that where you live on Planet Earth affects this phenomenon. For reasons that we do not yet comprehend, more girls than would be statistically expected are born at the equator, and more boys at northern latitudes. http://knavara.myweb.uga.edu/Navara%202009.pdf Mother Nature seems to "time" conceptions in parts of the world that experience winter, so more male babies will be born in optimal conditions. If you live around the equator, this information may not apply to you.

Anyway, according to Cagnacci, the best conditions for conceiving a baby of ANY gender (and therefore, a boy) are a day length of 12 hours and an average temperature of 12°C. Maximum conception rates take place at opposite times in regions on either side of the equator. In the Southern Hemisphere (even though this has not been studied) it is predicted that the opposite trend would be true. Fewer babies (but more girls) should be conceived in Sept-November in the Southern Hemisphere, and more babies (and more boys) in March-May.

(BTW this is NOT what is predicted by the ion theory that is part of traditional swaying lore. The ion theory claims that winter conceptions should = more boys and summer conceptions should = more girls, and that spring and fall are neutral.)

Why might this be? Babies conceived Sept - Nov. will be born in the summer months when the climate is pleasant and food abundant, and babies that are conceived March - May will be born Dec-Feb, when temps are coldest and food is scarcest. Baby boys need more calories than baby girls throughout pregnancy and after birth, and in fact throughout LIFE. Average energy intake among pregnant women carrying a boy compared with a girl | BMJ (higher caloric needs during boy pregnancy) http://www.kidsandnutrition.co.uk/ho...hild-need.html (males have higher caloric needs throughout infancy and childhood)

As an example, the estimated average requirement for baby boys for their first 6 months of life is 545-690 calories per day, whereas baby girls require less, on average 515-645 kcal per day. It is not hard to imagine that it is easier for mothers to provide more nutrition via breastfeeding, to baby boys during times when food is ample - on a personal note, I often find I cannot even produce enough breastmilk without drinking three Dr. Peppers a day (at 150 calories a pop) in addition to eating a balanced diet, so it makes a lot of sense to me on a gut level that such a mechanism might evolve over millions of years. It's not only in the first few months that those early calories matter - if a baby boy is chronically undernourished during his first few months of life, even if he survives infancy he may be at a disadvantage for the rest of his life, and therefore be less likely to survive and reproduce.

Also, there may be another strange mechanism at play. Three studies I have found Ambient temperature predicts sex ratios and male longevity (here is a longer version of that same study http://precedings.nature.com/documen...20093915-1.pdf), Sex Ratios at Birth and Environmental Temperatures - Springer (abstract only), and Climatic factors and secondary sex ratio in dair... [J Dairy Sci. 2006] - PubMed - NCBI (somehow I have the full text of this article in my files but I can only find the abstract now, sorry!) both seem to indicate that cold temperatures at time of conception and in early pregnancy seem to mean more females conceived/born and warmer temperatures, even only just one degree warmer, raised the odds that a male would be conceived/born.

(Again, this completely flies in the face of the ion theory. According to the ion theory, boys "like" cold things and girls "like" warm things.)

However, this is confuddling because of the study that found more girls were born in tropical latitudes. http://knavara.myweb.uga.edu/Navara%202009.pdf I ~personally~ believe that this may have more to do with other factors such as diet and cultural issues - in fact, according to one study Project MUSE - Login Africa overall had more girls than would be statistically expected, even the nations that are far from the equator such (such as South Africa - sex ratio of 102 boys for 100 girls) and some equatorial nations had exactly as many boys as would be statistically expected (Nigeria 106 boys for 100 girls). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...s_by_sex_ratio

[justlikeme]

So glad I found this page thank you for all the info!

[atomic sagebrush]

Lunaception
(original here) http://genderdreaming.com/forum/gend...naception.html

"Lunaception" is a term coined by author Louise Lacey in her 1974 book of the same name. Lacey (who freely admits she has NO scientific evidence to support the idea and that it is entirely based on "native wisdom" and anecdote) believes that the moon is capable of altering fertile patterns.

The theory is based on anthropological studies of various cultures that believed that menstruation was somehow tied to the moon. In fact, in many languages, the words for moon and menstruation are even based on common root words - in English, the word menstruation comes from the Latin word "mensis" meaning month, and the word "moon" also seems to stem from that same word (although the Latin word for moon is "luna" so the connection is hardly as straightforward as Lacey would have us think.)

The premise underlying Lunaception is actually quite intriguing. Prior to the invention of electricity, or even the discovery of fire (our ancestors lived for hundreds of millions of years sleeping outdoors without fire), our fertility evolved cyclically, governed by the natural rhythms of the earth, and some of these evolutionary anomalies are still alive and well within us. Much like a tailbone probably once supported tails we no longer grow, our bodies may have latent vestigial biorhythms that we aren't even aware of.

Lacey purports that most women experiences their menstrual cycles with the phases of the moon and at more or less the same time as other women. The idea of menstrual synchrony has been around since the early 70's - a couple of fairly decent studies seem to support the idea that women who live in close quarters with each other, start to ovulate and menstruate on or near to the same schedule. So whether or not the moon has anything to do with it, our tribal ancestors may very well have been all on the rag at the same time.

The conclusion is, that since we evolved sleeping under moon for hundreds of millions of years in close quarters with our fellow female primates, SOMETHING, whether it is gravity, light, or the elusive ion, affects our bodies in such a way that it can enhance or limit our fertility.

Clearly, the gravity of the moon does affect the oceans, so the idea that the moon may have some sort of similar affect on the fluids of the human body makes sense on a gut level. However, the moon's gravitation is not the same around the world (there are no tides at the equator and that's probably where most of our evolutionary past was spent) and high tides occur BOTH when the moon is full and when the moon is new. This is because the highest tides occur when the moon and sun are in alignment and have nothing actually to do with the phases of the moon...when we see a crescent moon for example, the rest of the moon is STILL THERE, we just can't see it. (for a good explanation, see The Moon And Tides) So whatever force may underlie lunaception, gravity has nothing to do with it.

Much more likely is that light emanating from the moon somehow affects our body chemistry in such a way as to enhance fertility. Solid science exists to show that day length and artificial light can affect health and fertility. The pineal gland, a little part of the brain referred to as "the third eye", produces melatonin and seems to be affected by light. Interestingly, the ovaries of rats who had their pineal glands removed, grew larger in size, and the ovaries of rats raised in constant bright light were unusually small. Children who have tumors of the pineal gland go into puberty very early. The pineal gland and light apparently DO affect fertility. Why might such a thing have evolved? I don't know what the "official" explanation might be, but to me it seems like ovulating in the full moon makes a heck of a lot of sense, if only so you could see what you're doing!

And what about the idea that this is some leftover instinct caused by menstrual synchrony? Well, it turns out that menstrual synchrony may not even be real. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/...y-really-exist Now, I worked in a dog kennel for 2 years and I did notice that female dogs (yes I know that's not the right terminology but this is a family website LOL) kept in the same pen did seem to cycle together, but it was very far from 100% of the time. So I have to put this into the plausible category as well, but not proven.

So then, there may be something to it. How do you use Lunaception for boosting fertility, regulating cycles, and swaying?

One of the most intriguing things I have noticed about gender swaying is, anything that seems to boost fertility, seems to sway blue, and anything that seems to reduce fertility seems to sway pink. (Even Clomid - although it does trigger ovulation it reduces fertility in other ways by creating hostile cervical mucus and a less inviting uterine lining.)

According to the book Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom by Chistiane Northrop MD, studies have shown that peak levels of conception (and concurrently, ovulation since ya can't exactly conceive without it) take place at the full moon. During the new moon, conception/ovulation rates are lowest, and more women begin their menstrual bleeding during the new moon. This is borne out 9 months later when more women go into labor during a full moon - of course conventional wisdom chalks it up to "full moon lunacy" but it may actually be because those pregnant women conceived during the full moon and are simply due to deliver their babies then! And many women seem to notice that their menstrual bleeding starts between 4-6 am, month after month, no earlier, no later. The trigger of darkness may have something to do with this.

We may be able to harness the power of light to help us regulate our cycles. One study involving over 2,000 women with irregular cycles found that just by keeping the light on while they sleep during the three days of ovulation (regardless of when those were) over half of the women were able to achieve regular 28/29 day cycles with 14 day LP. If you want to regulate your cycle or if you are having issues with short LP (less than 12-14 days), try keeping the light on for three days at ovulation and see if it helps you. Can't hurt, may help, and it doesn't cost a thing!

To boost fertility and/or sway blue, you will want to do one of two things. You can simply sleep with the light on when you ovulate and in total darkness the rest of the time. This will help your body believe that the moon is full and it will start churning out extra EWCM to make you more fertile.

Or, if you are a believer in ions, you will want to attempt to reset your ovulation to when the moon is full. According to the ion theory, positive ions sway blue and are somehow generated by the full moon, so it isn't enough just to rely on light to boost your fertility. You want light AND ions so you will want to ovulate with the full moon. In order to reset your ovulation, start sleeping with the light on during the three days you WANT to ovulate and sleep in total darkness the rest of the time. Then when your ovulation coincides with the full moon, ALSO sleep with the light on. You'll be getting both the potential benefits of light and ions.

If you're wanting to sway pink, there are actually three possibilities. You could sleep in the dark constantly and never turn the light on at all and just rely on the darkness to reduce your fertility at ovulation. OR for believers in ions, you'll first want to reset your ovulation to coincide with the new moon, when girl-producing negative ions are supposedly highest, by turning on the light during the new moon and tricking your body into thinking the moon is full. Then you can decide whether or not to keep the light on during the months you actually attempt. If you turn the light on when the moon is new, you're relying an awful lot upon the existence and swaying ability of ions and discounting the fertility boost that the light might bring, but it probably will help you get pregnant faster. If you turn the light out when the moon is new and you're ovulating, you will get the benefits of the darkness at ovulation and the potential benefits of the negative ions.

One other possibility that occurs to me for pink swayers is the notion of keeping the light on ALL THE TIME. Artificial light has been proven to wreak havoc with the body http://www.conceiveonline.com/fertil...ge-1/?Itemid=0 , lowers melatonin (melatonin may improve fertility and therefore sway blue Melatonin May Help IVF Success and Egg Quality - Infertility), so if you're trying for pink it may be that sleeping with a light on or tv going could help.

AFTER CONCEPTION FOR EITHER GENDER - It may help to prevent miscarriage by sleeping in a darkened room. This isn't proven but it certainly doesn't hurt to try it!!

FOR MORE INFO ABOUT MOON SIGNS AND SWAYING - http://genderdreaming.com/forum/show...es-for-swaying

[atomic sagebrush]

http://genderdreaming.com/forum/scie...by-gender.html

You "can't" carry a baby of that gender!!!

you "can't" carry a baby of that gender!

How many times have we heard THAT one?

For those of us with a lot of one gender and none of the other, well-meaning friends and relatives may chime in with that helpful tidbit, implying that for some medical reason, it's actually IMPOSSIBLE for us to conceive or carry to term a child of our desired gender. But how true is it?

Like many old wives' tales, this actually does have a basis in fact. Some women carry certain genetic diseases, like hemophilia or Duchenne muscular dystrophy, on one of their X chromosomes. Everyone has one X chromosome, but women have two. Because of this, if a woman has one bad X and one good X, the genetic data in the good X allows her to develop normally. However, she'll always carry the bad genetic information on her other X chromosome.

Until she has children, she may never even know she carries a defective X chromosome. And if she had all daughters, she still probably would never know, because females get one X from their mother, and one X from their father, so the odds are good that one or the other of these X's will be normal. Some of her daughters will carry the bad X chromosome and some won't, but none of them will develop the disease because they all got at least one good X.

If she has sons, however, then the situation becomes more complicated. Depending on which of their mother's X chromosomes they receive, sons of a woman who carries an X-linked disease can either be perfectly fine (they received a good X from their mom and then their dad's Y chromosome) or they will have the bad X and suffer from the disease. Because they only HAVE one X, they have nothing to fall back on, and they will get sick. If a woman carries one of these diseases, all her daughters will be perfectly healthy (half will be carriers) and half her sons will be healthy, statistically speaking. It's really the luck of the draw which X your children will receive.

Technically, girls CAN get these genetic diseases. But in order to do so, they have to have both parents who carry the disease on their X chromosome, and since the disease will manifest itself in their father, if your husband doesn't have any X-linked disease, the odds are pretty much 100% that his X chromosome is sound and even if you are a carrier of one of these diseases, your daughters would never develop them. If he does have an X-linked disease, it's a very mild one. Otherwise he would be visibly sick or dead.

While Y-linked genetic defects do exist, they are very mild. Colorblindness and an excessive amount of hair on the ears are a couple of examples. If Y-linked disorders caused serious disability, men who carried them would be incapable of fathering children and the mutation would not survive to be handed down from generation to generation. The reason why X-linked diseases exist despite being severe is because females are unaffected carriers, so the genetic mutation survives from one generation to the next. Only males who inherit their mother's one bad X chromosome will ever develop the disease.

Some X-linked diseases are chronic conditions like hemophilia, where a boy can manage the disease their entire life and still have a pretty normal existence. But others cause fetal death in utero or very early on in childhood. If you have a large number of healthy daughters, and have miscarried repeatedly (even if you don't know the gender of the child), you may want to consult with a genetic counselor to rule out the possibility that you carry one of these genetic disorders.

If you are a carrier, you may see a trend in your extended family of more daughters than sons being born, or mysterious cases where a baby boy was born, had developmental delays, and died at a young age. It's not always easy to tell, because doctors really didn't always know why people died even as little as 20 or 30 years ago and so may have attributed deaths to incorrect causes.

If you see such a pattern in your family (it will be on your mother's side), even if you have only one or two daughters or all sons and have never miscarried, you also may want to consult with a geneticist. Remember that it's sheer luck which of your X chromosomes your children receive, so even if you have 5 sons and they are all healthy, if you carry an X-linked disorder, you could still pass down that gene to your next son.

Most of these diseases are extremely, extremely rare. It is very unlikely that you are a carrier, even if you have 10 daughters and no sons. And it is impossible if you have 10 sons and no daughters, because it's NEVER impossible to carry daughters, due to girls having two X chromosomes. So when your neighbor peeks over the garden gate and tells you that you "just can't carry" girls or boys, just ignore him or her. The facts tell a different story.

[atomic sagebrush]

http://genderdreaming.com/forum/gend...ypothesis.html
Understanding the Trivers Willard Hypothesis

Sometimes we get so caught up in the hows of swaying that we forget to think about the whys. But a deeper understanding of WHY swaying happens is of vital importance to the success of everyone’s sway. This understanding can help you formulate a plan so you can work with your body and with Mother Nature, rather than against them. Plus, it can help you understand why atomic sagebrush advises the things that she does rather than sticking to traditional sway tactics that other people swear have worked for them and may even have some pseudo-science-y gibberish behind them, and make it easier for you to let go of things that simply don’t work in favor of concentrating on that which does.

What is the Trivers Willard Hypothesis? Trivers Nutshell version: the Trivers Willard Hypothesis hinges on the idea that animals have a very good reason, evolutionarily speaking, for being able to skew gender ratio in favor of the gender offspring with the best odds of survival to adulthood/competing for mates/successfully reproducing, and that both behavioral and biological mechanisms have evolved (editorial note - or, been designed into us by God) to ensure that this happens. For swaying purposes, we’ll set aside the behavioral aspect of Trivers-Willard and focus on the biological – the stuff that is happening inside our bodies totally out of our control that causes us to conceive more of one gender than another – altho I may mention it along the way.

Trivers-Willard is all about the genes - if a male offspring has a better chance at handing down their ancestors’ genes to the next generation, then a couple should have more boys (and be willing and able to invest in them more heavily after birth), and if a female offspring has a better chance at handing down her ancestors’ genes, then a couple should have more girls (and be willing and able to invest in them more heavily after birth).

What’s the difference between boys and girls? How could the gender of your baby matter to their future survival and their chances of handing down their genes?

Firstly, on average, boys need more calories from the moment of conception, throughout pregnancy, childhood (there ~may~ be a brief period in infancy and toddlerhood where boys do not need more calories) adolescence and into adulthood. Baby boys weigh on average 3.5 oz. more than baby girls do at birth and this difference extends into young adulthood with active older teens and young men requiring in excess of 1000 calories a day more than active females of the same age group. Boys are more demanding even in utero
How Many Calories Do Children Need? | eHow.com

(editorial note – some people like to chalk this up to sexism; as in, boys eat more because parents expect them to be ‘growing boys’ or ‘more active than girls’ or whatever and also claim that moms of boys eat more during pregnancy because they know they’re pregnant with boys. The simple fact is that the average male is larger than the average female and needs more nutrients as a result and research has indicated that male fetuses actually send a signal to their mother’s body that makes them hungrier. So if you see this idea quoted as fact on the Internet, please disregard it because it’s motivated by political correctness and not biological truth.)

Even our breastmilk changes depending on whether or not we’re carrying a boy or a girl. Differences in breastmilk for boys and girls (there’s a link to a study about halfway down this page that explains this in depth.) Beyond that, as many of us have found, when we don’t ingest enough calories while nursing, our milk supply can suffer as a result and so since boys tend to need more calories, any period of time where we are not producing enough milk for our baby can really have an effect, boys more so than girls.

So? some may ask. So I don’t make enough milk for a couple days. What difference does it make really? My baby is not going to DIE because I don’t have quite enough milk for a day or two. Well, keep in mind that the modern world in which we live, with a convenience store full on goodies on every corner, clean water, Nestle Good Start, vaccines, penicillin, and indoor heating, is something that has existed only a very short time in the grand scheme of things. Humans and their genetic ancestors have been around in some form or another for 85 million years, starting off as primates diverging from other mammals, and then becoming more and more human as the years progressed until we gradually became what we are today 50-100,000 years ago.
Most of our existence, the time during which all these funny quirky genes were developing, your baby absolutely could die if you didn’t have enough milk for a day or two. Infant mortality before the 20th century ranged from 30-50%...as many as HALF of all babies born did not survive the first year of life (and it may have been higher still in the environment where our primate ancestors dwelled.)

Aside from dehydration (still the number one killer of babies in the developing world, capable of killing within hours) and chronic starvation, even a temporary lack of food can depress the immune system and make a child less likely to withstand a virus or bacterial infection that would otherwise be harmless. As an example, rotavirus is a disease that is generally harmless to healthy children in the US, Europe, and Australia where babies have access to ample breastmilk or clean formula, but kills 450,000 children a year in the developing world Rotavirus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Beyond sheer survival, a lack of nutrition in infancy can set a child up for a lifetime’s disadvantage. If one doen’t have enough food/nutrients even temporarily in childhood, there can be health effects that last a lifetime. (there are gobs of studies about this that anyone can Google so I won’t share links) Physical development and mental development can be stunted or delayed, the immune system is less able to fight off disease/parasites and so a child is chronically unhealthy. Human development is such a delicate thing, that a major nutritional deficit or life-threatening illness, when a child is 4 days old, 4 months old, or 4 years old can have repercussions that last a lifetime. Developmental delays don’t just go away with a couple of days of good eats. The brain and body can be forever altered by nutritional deficits or serious illness in infancy.

For males, this disadvantage grows huge as maturity approaches. In nature, primates tend to live in harems where one large, strong male is protector and several females live under his protection. Males compete physically for leadership of these harems and a weak male has very little chance of ever becoming the leader of a harem – strong young males band together and bide their time, either by taking the harem over or sneaking opportunities at willing females (sadly, sometimes unwilling females), but a weak male will never get that chance and is usually driven off by the others. If he is even able to survive (single males oftentimes don’t live very long), he’ll never get a chance to mate.

Females, on the other hand, are in high demand as mates. Even smaller, weaker, or more sickly females can typically find someone to mate with them – they don’t have to fight for the right to party (reproductively speaking LOL) Thus, if a mama doesn’t have enough resources to guarantee a big strong son, she’s much better off having a daughter instead because a daughter has much higher chances of surviving to adulthood and successfully reproducing than a son does in that circumstance.

But atomic, humans aren’t deer, cows, or monkeys. Can this really even APPLY to us? We’ve been living in civilization for thousands of years, surely these factors no longer affect us.
Actually, there are some pretty compelling reasons to believe that humans may be the MOST susceptible to the effects of the Trivers Willard Hypothesis. (some are a bit obscure, so PLEASE let me know if this is in any way unclear.)

First of all, animals that have a lot of babies all at once, be it in the millions or even just 5-10 at a time (sponges, sea slugs, most amphibians/most fish/some reptiles, insects, and mammals and birds that have litters or clutches) have a lot less reason to alter the gender ratio. They can take a chance on sending out some boys and some girls and just take the gamble. Odds are that someone will survive to reproduce even in less than ideal circumstances. Humans and most of our closest genetic ancestors, have babies one or two at a time, Octomom notwithstanding, and so it is in our genes’ self-interest to stack the deck as much as possible in favor of our baby’s survival to adulthood/reproduction.

Secondly, most animals are able to raise a baby in a year’s time or even less. Some animals like rabbits, breed, well, like rabbits, and can have 2-3 litters in a year. If you can have 30 kids in a year, if some are boys and some are girls and some live and some don’t, the odds are still with you that someone will manage to make it to the next generation. Whereas humans take a very long time and a huge investment in resources, to raise ONE fragile little offspring to adulthood, so we have to make sure that one offspring has the best chance we can possibly provide, up to and including skewing the gender ratio to conceive the child with the best odds.

Thirdly, birth is an extremely dangerous proposition for humans. A combination of walking upright on two legs and the increase in head size that enabled us to become rapidly more intelligent than all other animals, has created a situation where human birth is more dangerous for mother and child than it is for all other mammals because a baby human’s large head full of clever brains, may not fit easily through the human pelvis, altered to enable us to walk on two legs. Here’s a thorough explanation. Neandertals Babies Didn't Do the Twist - ScienceNOW

As a result, in order for us to be able give birth at all, our offspring have to come out weak, small, and helpless and require years of constant parental care before becoming independent. This severely limits the amount of offspring we can even have, esp. in the case of women. If you have to expend a good 5-8 years raising a child after birth to the point at which leaving them alone for a heartbeat does not lead invariably to their demise, again, you have a lot of motivation to ensure that your effort does not go to waste on anything less than a child with the best chances of survival/reproduction.

Fourthly, humans have a funny quirk called hidden ovulation. We’re the only creatures on the face of the planet who can come into “season” every month and conceive at any point and don’t KNOW we’re capable of conceiving (only very recently have we been able to tell this and even now it’s kinda dicey.) It’s very possible that we might get pregnant at times of year and circumstances that are not ideal, and in less than ideal circumstances, and so it is highly likely that maternal condition is MUCH more important to humans than it is to other animals.
It’s fine for cows to give birth in March, they’ll have spring and summer and fall for their babies to get big and strong.

For humans, thanks to hidden ovulation, our bodies don’t know when we’re going to get pregnant; we can’t necessarily rely on coming into season at a favorable time of year. Our bodies have nothing to go on but our condition (and possibly a few environmental cues such as day length and ambient temperature) so it’s very likely that our condition matters quite a lot in terms of fertility and also our offspring’s gender because that’s all our body has to go off of when judging odds of survival.

Finally, pair bonding. Unlike most other animals, humans tend to live in monogamous relationships that stay mated for some time and childrearing is done together, with both male and female being involved. Behaviorally, we are more similar to many birds than we are to some of our fellow mammals, even primates, and birds with similar behavior patterns to humans have been proven beyond a doubt to alter gender ratio quite significantly. The human male may bring more to the table (both literally and figuratively) than the average mammal/primate male who hangs around more to scare off aggressors and enjoy the favors of his harem, if he hangs around at all, than a human dad who provides a home, food, and care for his offspring. Women who are in committed monogamous relationships, esp. in families headed by a male that is high in the social hierarchy, have more sons than is statistically expected. We don’t know why this is exactly or how it could work, but for a thorough discussion of the possibilities, please read http://genderdreaming.com/forum/gend...pink-blue.html

atomic, this may be all well and good, maybe it even makes some sense, but doesn’t PROVE that swaying works before conception. Couldn’t people just conceive a gender from luck and then be more likely to miscarry a baby boy? Couldn’t variations in gender ratio boil down to post-conception losses and all this before we conceive is nothing but nonsense?

First of all, the fact is that swaying happens without our doing a single thing. 140-160 boys are conceived for every 100 girls and then so many more boys are lost along the way that the gender ratio falls to 102-106/100 by birth. Even that gender ratio is seriously skewed. Men make 50-50 X and Y sperm and that the gender ratio is any different than that, proves that something is swaying gender blue prior to conception anyway. GUESS WHAT??? MEN MAKE 50-50 X AND Y SPERM!!! AND In defense of swaying Part 1 - Is swaying real??

Beyond statistics alone, eggs are considered “biologically expensive” to produce. Eggs are scarce and precious and every day that passes, we have fewer of them. Compared to sperm, which men are making constantly in huge numbers and can keep on making into their senescence, we are born with all the eggs we’ll ever have at birth and our eggs actually start dying off in droves before we’re ever even born. Each day that goes by, we have less and less eggs. Additionally, during every month of our fertile window, from puberty through menopause, an average of 15-20 eggs in each ovary start to develop and only the best one or two manage to complete the process and are ovulated. So every month, our limited-and-shrinking-by-the-day egg reserve drops by an additional 30-40 eggs. We only have (assuming puberty at 12 and perimenopause at 45) 396 months in which to even conceive, best case scenario, and of course we lose months and years due to pregnancy, breastfeeding, miscarriage, etc. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a lot of time.

Due to our narrow fertile window, it would be ludicrous for our bodies to waste time conceiving babies with anything less than optimal odds of survival. A woman whose genes allowed her to repeatedly conceive babies with lower odds of survival only to miscarry, would be needlessly squandering precious eggs and precious months of her limited fertility. Logic dictates that something is most likely swaying before conception simply because the human body doesn’t like waste and is excellent at conservation.

Additionally, miscarriage itself (let alone losses later in pregnancy) can be a risky business and a woman could end up risking her life for a baby with less than ideal chances of survival – genes just don’t favor that kind of scenario. Not only would you risk your own life and that of your unborn child, but you’re your already living children – kids without moms don’t always survive very long, even in early human societies.

Your genes WANT to survive and the genes we have, have been the ones that were the level-best at being handed down by our primate ancestors and early humans for nearly 100 million years. It is extremely likely that some mechanism(s) have evolved (or been designed into us by God) to make sure that when we get pg, if one gender vs. another has better odds of survival, we’re going to be at least somewhat more likely to conceive that gender – otherwise our bodies wouldn’t take the chance. It’s not a perfect system and it may very well be that some boys are lost after conception from lack of nutrients, but overall, I believe the data supports the idea that swaying prior to conception is a biological fact even tho we do not yet know how it all works.

Ok, then, please explain why, if this Trivers-Willard thingamagigger exists, why don’t poor countries have way more girls and rich countries have way more boys?

This is a complicated and intriguing question that I’ve spent countless hours thinking about. I don’t claim to have all the answers on every aspect of swaying but I have come up with some explanations that make sense to me and seem to fit the facts.

First of all, many countries in Africa DO have more daughters born than is statistically expected, consistently, year in and year out. In fact, most equatorial countries do (with a few exceptions, they tend to be poorer than temperate climates). Also, many countries particularly in Asia and the Middle East, sadly practice female infanticide that skews the gender ratio towards males so much that we really have no way of knowing what the true birth rate is in these countries. (Aside – some of the statistical “data” used to support the French Gender Diet comes from these countries and should be viewed with a skeptical eye. The FGD book quotes very extreme gender ratios from some Asian countries and explains it as due to a high sodium, low calcium diet, but modern research has revealed that the skewed gender ratio in Asian countries is almost certainly because of female infanticide and gender-based abortion.)

Secondly, even in poorer countries and times of famine, there are vast differences in the amount of food resources different individuals have access to. Some people ALWAYS have plenty, some people NEVER have enough, regardless of the overall prosperity of the nation in which they live. Aside from financial resources, some people just don’t eat as much as others, or eat much more, due to personal preference, cultural reasons, health or psychological issues. We’ve all heard the expression, “You can never be too rich or too thin” and many times, obesity and overeating is actually affiliated with poverty, not wealth. Over the course of a country’s entire population, it becomes far too complex to tease out these factors. There is no way to really generalize to the individual level, on the basis of the overall GNP of the country in which a person lives.

Third, it may very well be the case that in times of true famine, some women who were in declining condition and might have been more "set" for girls to begin with, decline further and stop conceiving all together (or choose not to conceive due to lack of resources). Women who might have been neutral with equal odds at a boy or a girl, may decline and have more girls. Women who were in great physical condition, may simply not decline in condition enough to have girls and may continue to have sons even if times are hard for them. (One study in Africa found that women who conceived boys during time of famine, had greater muscle mass than those who conceived girls.)

Or, it may be that due to their individual wealth/health, anyone who is able to conceive (or who is WILLING to, because even poor countries and historically, they had/have their ways of preventing pregnancy) may very well be richer and/or in better health than others and may be preselected towards boys to begin with. The couples who might otherwise have conceived girls, may either be unable or unwilling to conceive, skewing the ratio towards the families who were well off enough to remain fertile in the face of famine, and were willing to continue having children even in less than ideal circumstances.

Basically, all this amounts to the levels of boys and girls staying pretty consistent in times of famine – less babies may be born overall because some people who might otherwise have had babies choose not to or cannot have them due to lack of food; despite this, the gender ratio itself would remain somewhere in the ballpark of 50-50.

Fourth, improving/declining maternal condition may be more effective a sway tactic than nutrient deprivation is. (of course, nutrient deprivation is really just one way of causing declining maternal condition, but there are of course other ways to do the same thing.) Declining condition does not always mean less access to food and more food does not necessarily equal improving condition. People who don't eat much but eat the right foods, can be in great physical condition while another person can be overly nourished and be in poor condition. The reason why we lose weight to sway pink, is because it's unreliable and terrible for health to try and gain weight for swaying. Tons of things outside of food resources have been proven to sway - exposure to chemicals, certain diseases, stress, smoking, increasing parental age; all sway by meeting the prerequisite of declining maternal condition, even in someone who eats 3000 cals a day.

Fifth, humanity has evolved for its entire existence eating very few calories - we can adjust and stay fertile even in a lower calorie environment. The whole idea that women need 2000+ cals a day to survive on, and foods from all four food groups, is new to the human experience. Most of our existence was spent subsisting on a few bites of half-eaten antelope carcass scavenged from some hyenas, a rotten banana, and some termites. We are GOOD at staying fertile and having babies of both genders on not a lot of calories, otherwise there would not be 7 billion of us. Most women around the world eat a lot less than that and always have, and both boys and girls keep right on being conceived. In fact, it may even be that too much food is causing us to decline in condition so for some of us in wealthier countries, we actually have too much of a good thing going on and gender ratio may be skewed more pink than it would be otherwise, as a result. Please read the following essay for a more thorough explanation. http://genderdreaming.com/forum/gend...irls-boys.html

Finally, gender swaying can never be 100% or even close, because if it were, the human race would have died out a long time ago. Nor can it be easy to figure out - it MUST be multifactorial or those clever old wives would have figured it out long, long ago. It’s very likely that there are dozens, if not hundreds of factors that are swaying, some of which may be utterly out of our control. Food resources are just one of many cues from the environment that our bodies interpret and use to "decide" which gender has the best shot of survival to reproduce. Luck has to play a part as well – obviously my belief is that you can up your odds with swaying (maybe even quite a lot) but Mother Nature/God has a vested interest in ensuring that there are always both boys and girls being born!!

[atomic sagebrush]

In defense of swaying Part 1 - Is swaying real??
http://genderdreaming.com/forum/scie...ying-real.html
For all those out there whose husbands, doctors, college professors, parents, and obnoxious strangers swear that swaying can't possibly be true because everyone "knows" that gender is 50-50, the man is the only party that matters, and it is luck alone that determines gender.

Ignaz Semmelweis was a doctor in the 19th century, who worked in a hospital with two maternity clinics. He noticed a startling difference in the number of deaths in one of the maternity clinics - on average, 10% of all women who delivered in that clinic (the First Clinic, where medical doctors trained) died of childbed fever (a disease that used to kill many women after giving birth) while less than 5% died in the other clinic (the Second Clinic, where midwives trained). To his chagrin, he realized that even fewer women who delivered at home, aided by friends and family, developed childbed fever...less than 1%. Something had to be causing the different rates of death, but what???

He got his answer when tragically, his good friend was accidentally stabbed by a scalpel while performing an autopsy and died a short time later, of what seemed to be childbed fever!!! Semmelweis realized that the doctors-in-training at the First Clinic were coming directly from performing autopsies to deliver babies, without washing their hands first, and this contamination was what was causing childbed fever. The midwives in the Second Clinic did not perform autopsies and were thus less likely to spread this contagion to patients. Semmelweis began to urge doctors to wash their hands with a bleach solution before delivering babies, and wherever the practice was adopted, deaths from childbed fever plummeted.

Dr. Semmelweis is today hailed as "the Savior of Women" but during his day, his theory was looked upon very skeptically by many. Germs had not been discovered yet and disease was "KNOWN" by every educated person to be caused by "bad air/miasma" or an imbalance in the "Four Humours". Some doctors took offense at the suggestion that they were unclean or could possibly be spreading disease. He was ridiculed constantly and forced to mount defenses against false accusations. The constant persecution eventually took its toll on Dr. Semmelweis and he was committed to an institution against his will, where he died, ironically of septicemia, the very thing he had fought so hard against.

Ah, those old-timey people. Thank goodness we have modern medicine to keep us from making decisions based on superstition rather than facts. Right???

Fast forward to the 20th century. Germs had been discovered and modern medicine seemed capable of performing miracles. Doctors "KNEW" for many decades, what triggered the formation of ulcers. Stress and eating spicy foods caused ulcers and consequently, patients were told to relax and eat bland foods to cure them. However, in the late 70's and early 80's, pathologist Robin Warren and Dr. Barry Marshall had a different theory - they believed a bacterium that they had observed was actually the cause of ulcers. (some previous research dating back as far as the 1800's also seemed to support this idea, but most ignored it).

Warren and Marshall were also held up for ridicule by the medical establishment. Everyone "KNEW" that ulcers were caused by spicy foods and stress, and everyone "KNEW" that bacteria couldn't possibly live inside the human stomach. In 1984, Marshall decided to put his money where his mouth was (literally) and drank a beaker of H. Pylori, the bacterium he believed to be responsible for causing ulcers. Only 5 days later he developed a raging stomach infection. Eventually, Marshall and Warren collected enough evidence to prove their theory correct and now people with ulcers are given antibiotics rather than vague instructions for relaxation and drinking milk.

Scientific progress often takes the form of the discoveries of Semmelweis and Marshall/Warren. Someone observes an occurance that does not make sense given the evidence, and comes up with an alternative explanation. At times, like Semmelweis, the person who notices the anomaly may not understand or have enough data to explain why things are the way they are, but that doesn't negate their observations. We still do not know what causes gravity, but that does not mean that gravity doesn't exist...Newton observed gravity, he described gravity, and we don't go flying off the planet for SOME reason!!

The scientific writer and historian Thomas Kuhn referred to the set of scientific beliefs that define a certain era as a paradigm. When new discoveries challenge these beliefs, the paradigm shifts and a new paradigm is formed. Regardless of what a person learned as fact in high school biology or even in medical school, and no matter how many fancy letters follow their name or diplomas hang upon their walls, the truth is, swaying is 100% supported by both logic and evidence. We need a new paradigm, because "gender is a coin flip" paradigm is not supported by the facts. People, even highly knowledgeable experts, "KNOW" a lot of things but the fact is, they only know them until new information comes along. And at times, it's the most knowledgeable and informed amongst us who are the most resistant to changing their opinions, because they are so steeped in the paradigm that they are accustomed to.

What do we really know about gender ratio???

We KNOW that animals like birds, amphibians, and reptiles can and do alter gender ratio. No one disputes this and a variety of mechanisms have already been proved to sway gender in these animals, such as temperature and minerals in the environment.

We KNOW that experts on evolutionary biology, even very famous and world-renowned scientists like Richard Dawkins, EO Wilson, Robert Trivers, and Satoshi Kanazawa, believe that some similar mechanism(s) has surely evolved amongst mammals to alter the gender ratio to maximize a child's survival. According to the book "Darwin's Ghost" by Steve Jones, even Charles Darwin himself suspected that animals, including mammals, could vary gender ratio of their offspring. Even though they don't know the mechanism itself, just like Newton's apple falling to earth for some reason that we still don't comprehend, they believe such a mechanism(s) exists.

We KNOW that under certain circumstances, mammals in the lab or observed in the wild, have had different gender ratios than what is statistically expected, at times quite dramatically. So aside from theory, mammals evidently CAN alter their gender ratio much like birds and reptiles can. Dietary factors, hormonal changes, and social dominance have all been linked to changes in the expected sex ratio. http://www.reproduction-online.org/c...17/2/403.short Birth sex ratio and social rank: consistency and variability within and between primate groups
Maternal Diet and Other Factors Affecting Offspring Sex Ratio: A Review
http://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/zoostaff/la...s/kruuk99b.pdf
(there are literally hundreds of studies like this, this is just the first few I came across on my desk.)

We KNOW that human men make 50-50 X and Y sperm. They HAVE to. It is biologically impossible for them to make anything BUT 50-50 X and Y sperm. http://genderdreaming.com/forum/gend...-X-AND-Y-SPERM

We KNOW that the gender ratio of boys born to girls born amongst humans is NOT 50-50. Worldwide, gender ratio varies from 103-100 to 108-100. Sperm that are 50% X and 50% Y mean that some other mechanism MUST be in play to produce gender ratios like that.

We KNOW that the gender ratio of boys conceived to girls conceived is even greater...approximately 140-160 boys are conceived to every 100 girls. Source - Essentials of Genetics, 4th edition, William S. Klug and Michael R. Cummings, published in 2006. Again, sperm that are 50-50 and rates of conception that different, mean that some mechanism is at play BEFORE (or during) conception, rather than an increased rate of miscarrying girls altering the gender ratio. Actually more boys are miscarried, by a significant amount. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...60315/abstract

We KNOW that families with several boys are statistically more likely to conceive boys that should be "expected" and families with several girls are also statistically more likely to conceive boys than should be "expected." Also, mixed gender families are less likely than is "expected". http://genderdreaming.com/forum/gend...!-anybody-know Research has also indicated that some families have more of a particular gender than is "expected." (this is the same link as above - both topics are discussed in this essay.) http://genderdreaming.com/forum/gend...-X-AND-Y-SPERM Amongst twin conceptions, girls are more common than they "should" be and twin boys are less common that statistics predict. Ergo, gender cannot be the simple flip of the coin it is made out to be.

We KNOW that women in certain careers tend to have altered sex ratios in their offspring. http://www.danechristensen.net/stuff/Job-Child.pdf If gender ratio was entirely determined by the male and the luck of the draw, how could this be the case?

We KNOW that maternal diet seems to alter the gender ratio in humans. Maternal Eating Disorders Influence Sex Ratio at Birth BBC News | HEALTH | 'More girl babies' for vegetarians http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.o.../1661.abstract

We KNOW that it's not just the ladies who affect gender ratio...males in certain careers such as chemistry, deep sea diving, fighter pilots, professional cyclists, pesticide applicators, and anesthetists have more daughters than is statistically expected, despite the fact that they STILL make 50-50 X and Y sperm and both X and Y sperm have been proved to be equally hardy and long-lived. http://genderdreaming.com/forum/gend...rm-and-Y-sperm

To sum up, regardless of what the conventional wisdom claims, what "experts" say or even what your family doctor believes, the evidence demonstrates that gender swaying is possible, and sex ratio of offspring is neither simple luck or entirely determined by the male. We may not know why or how it all works just yet, but the evidence is def. on the side of swaying.

[atomic sagebrush]

http://genderdreaming.com/forum/scie...s-swayers.html
Understanding Scientific Studies for Swayers

There’s little more frustrating to a dedicated swayer, than when you have your sway plan pretty well in hand and then someone posts a link to a study or article that seems to fly in the face of your sway plan. Equally discouraging is when you look for data to back up your sway plan and realize it’s really pretty sparse, or ask a question and all atomic has to say is “We don’t know!”

Let’s take a closer look about where these studies come from and what they mean, and hopefully shed some light on why no one needs to EVER panic or despair over a single study.

1)Why are there so few studies done on gender swaying?

It’s a maddening truth; very few studies are done on gender ratio (and the ones that are out there, are often less awesome than we would like.) Altho I couldn’t find a hard number online, there simply aren’t enough medical researchers to go around. Think of it this way…in order to be a medical researcher, you have to hold a doctorate (requiring a decade or more of study and a huge financial investment in one’s eduation), and medical researchers must study every aspect of medicine out there – cancer, heart disease…gender ratio is really pretty far down the list of priorities for most, not only because gender ratio seems a minor concern to many people and many people find desire for an offspring of a particular gender distasteful, but also because there’s very little money to be made at it (see number 2 below)

Of the studies that are done, many are done by graduate students working towards their doctorate (they’re often the only ones who have the time and inclination to study something that is a bit outside the main******.) Often, their more qualified academic supervisor will tack their name on the front of the study before publication to give the study more credibility. While there’s nothing wrong with this in theory, there have been times I’ve read a study where the data was sound and intriguing, but the conclusion was farfetched or downright misleading. (Example – the study that looked at gender ratio through family trees and hypothesized that there is a gene that makes more X or Y sperm, when other science strongly indicates that isn’t true and could never be true. That was a student’s thesis paper…not that it makes it useless, just that to my way of thinking, it carries less weight than a study done by a fully qualified researcher with a lifetime of experience. Boy Or Girl? It's In The Father's Genes)

So basically, we’re dealing with a very limited pool to begin with (few medical researchers), a large body of data to study (the entire pantheon of medicine/biology), and gender ratio is very far down the list of priorities for most researchers (and can even reflect badly upon them should they pursue it.)

2) Who is funding these studies and why?

Further complicating matters, most scientific studies are funded by pharmaceutical companies that stand to make billions of dollars in profits from drug sales (on average, a single drug company makes profits of $9-13 billion dollars a year) and focus their energies on things that can make them money – the creation of new drugs. While governments and universities do fund studies, the cost of a single, well designed study can be upwards of $12 million dollars and take years to carry out, and are often limited to political hot-potatoes like breast cancer and AIDS that have strong political lobbies backing them up.

Not only does gender swaying lack a political lobby, there are millions of people who believe the very idea to be repellent, harkening back to the age of eugenics. Gender selection is illegal in many countries. Thus, it’s highly unlikely that we can expect any reliable studies from the people who are the best at them – drug companies, government research facilities, and research universities.
We do benefit from the castoffs of the big money fertility business, but their interests lie in getting couples pregnant and that’s where they make their money, not in determining the hows and whys boys and girls are conceived. Fertility clinics in many countries could never use that information anyway because gender selection is illegal and have no interest in pursuing the issue.

The cold, hard truth is that we don’t have enough information and we may NEVER have enough information because there’s no real money to be made here. People may say “If gender swaying were real, someone would have figured it out a long time ago because they’d make a fortune at it” but that really isn’t the case. If diet and lifestyle is the key, no one will ever make $9 billion dollars of profit a year from peddling a diet and exercise book, even if it was a bestseller. And the entire issue is so fraught with political and historical baggage, that many wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. We’re on our own here. So we have to become experts at picking the wheat from the chaff and discerning good studies from bad ones.

3)Why are some studies better than others and how can we tell?

There are a few criteria that help to determine a good study from a bad one.

--It must be done in humans. Yes, we do occasionally have access to intriguing studies done in other animals but at the end of the day, mice, cows, sows, hinds, wild horses, and especially, especially sea sponges, marine worms, etc. are NOT humans and have drastically different dietary needs and even more importantly, drastically different reproductive cycles than any other creature on the face of the globe. Humans are the only animal that is constantly fertile and has “hidden ovulation” (historically speaking, and actually up to a very few years ago) where neither male nor female even KNOWS when she’s coming into heat (ovulating). Even with modern technology it’s difficult to pinpoint O!

Also, humans, by virtue of having fewer offspring over the course of a lifetime than most other animals, actually have the most motivation for being able to alter gender ratio of their offspring in some fashion to increase odds of survival and handing down genes. If you only GET one offspring, it really behooves you to be able to “pick” the gender of offspring with the best odds of survival and reproduction. I strongly suspect that humans may be the most susceptible to swaying for this very reason. If you’re a female dog having a litter of 10 puppies every year, you can afford to play around with having some boys and some girls. If you’re a human being whose entire genetic burden rests on the shoulders of one offspring over the course of a lifetime, you better do whatever it takes to ensure that offspring has the absolute best chance of getting a mate.

Editorial note - It is really quite ludicrous to assume that because you can make marine worms (who have millions of offspring, release millions of eggs and sperm over the course of a lifetime, are able to change their genders depending on external environment, and do not even fertilize eggs in the female’s body) have more boys or girls if you dump some sodium or calcium in their tanks, that this can in any way be extrapolated to mammals, and especially to humans. I BEG you, do not base a sway on any study done in any animal lower on the food chain than mice.

--A study should include as few variables as possible. Example – you can’t study timing by giving people who want girls, Clomid and telling them to DTD 3 days before ovulation, and performing IUI on O day for people who want boys, and then make any claim that timing sways at all. You cannot ADD variables to an experiment, it negates or at least confuses the results.

As complex as gender swaying is, it may be impossible to fully separate cause from effect that way. We’d need to take a thousand genetically identical women who ate identical diets throughout their entire life before switching to a sway diet, and impregnate them all from one batch of sperm (and hope that the guy we got it from, was not predisposed to father more of one gender than another.) We may NEVER be able to fully know every aspect of gender ratio and that means that eliminating conflicting variables in studies is even MORE important because there are already so many variables that are utterly beyond our control.

--Everyone taking part in a trial has to be informed about it and consent. This is a rule designed to prevent abuse on the part of the researcher, which sadly happened quite a bit during the 20th century even up to the 1960’s (Google “Tuskeegee Experiment”). The downside of this very valuable and important rule is, when people know what the outcome of a study is “supposed” to be, they may alter their behavior, may remember things inaccurately, and may even fudge data to prevent the researchers from getting mad at them if they didn’t follow the rules of the study. Also, the people who are willing to participate in said study may be self-selected in some way that might alter the results…example, the Dutch study. It’s not the best science to take a group of people who are highly motivated to have a child of a particular gender and tell them to eat certain foods and just TRUST that they aren’t going to do other gender swaying methods at the same time. They’re so highly motivated to have a baby of their DG that they might do anything, even break the rules of the study itself to get that baby.

Plus, never underestimate the power of the human mind and the placebo effect. It’s been proven that if a person believes strongly enough that a drug will work for them, they may feel better after taking it even if the pill is nothing other than sugar. Gender swaying may even have a sort of a reverse placebo due to the idea of swaycession raising testosterone levels - some people who might have gotten pink, may end up getting blue due to their T levels skyrocketing as they launch .

As a result of all these factors, we actually may find that we get better data from studies that were not even DONE on gender ratio, but instead were studying a different topic entirely and were done in the population as a whole, not a tiny subset of people who are suffering from strong gender desire. (luckily, we do have some studies like that.)

--It needs to be well-powered (i.e. include many people, and the more people, the more reliable the results) A study done on O+12 that involved 33 people, only 2 of whom even conceived on the day after O (possibly) proves NOTHING.

--It needs to use the most reliable methods and technology. Many studies done prior to the last decade, rely on bad science and outdated technology, such as timing studies where ovulation was never even pinpointed or women were told to simply BD on CD 14, when we know that ovulation can vary dramatically between women and even in the same woman from month to month.
Another example is “quinacrine staining” to tell the difference between X and Y sperm. It doesn’t work, and any study that uses this method, is worthless and should be disregarded.

Also, always keep in mind that the methods of study themselves may affect the outcome…Microsort IS the best method we have of differentiating X and Y sperm, but it may be that the Microsort process affects the sperm in some way that may change their behavior or qualities.

--It has to have an appropriate design (randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded). Patients need to be randomly placed into different treatment groups and neither they nor the medical staff attending them should know whether they are receiving the placebo or the treatment. Let’s emphasize that – NEITHER patient NOR researcher should know if they are receiving placebo or treatment. A study where researchers tell people to eat a certain diet to conceive a baby girl or boy and they BOTH know going in what the desired results are, violates this precept big time, and should be viewed cautiously.

That sounds impossible to get around where swaying is concerned, but I believe the best study on gender ratio and diet that we have so far, was done by Fiona Matthews and her assistants and Oxford. She wasn’t studying gender ratio, she was studying birth defects, and so she and her researchers, and the participants in the study, had no motivation to fudge results consciously or subconsciously. Only after the fact did they notice that women who consumed the most nutrients had the most boys, and those who consumed the least nutrients had the most girls. I think the Oxford study is worth 50 FGD/Dutch studies for this very reason. The Nurses’ Study II is also a good study (done on diet and how it affects fertility), but unfortunately there isn’t any data on gender outcomes that I am aware of.

Randomized means that you have to take people from the population as a whole to ensure that any variables sort of average out over the population. A study done solely on women with PCOS or anorexia, while they may be helpful in many ways, can’t really tell us much about people without PCOS or anorexia, because they probably have different hormonal profiles and may respond to diet in different ways. A study done on infertile couples might yield very different results than one done on fertile couples. A study done on diet in women who’ve already had 2-3-4-5 boys/girls already, is less valuable than a study done on the population at random, because it may be those women are predisposed to conceive a certain gender, or may be statistically “due” to conceive the other.
This is not make or break and in fact studies done on select groups can actually be informative, but we just can’t assume that they will always apply to us personally.

--It should be long enough to supply meaningful conclusions. In an ideal world, we’d take a million couples and monitor their diets and lifestyles over their reproductive lives, but of course this isn’t doable. I WOULD love to see a study done on couples who swayed more than one time, however. Are these results flukes, one time shots, or is there really something consistent going on??

--Studies done by a single researcher or group of researchers who are highly motivated to produce a certain result (William James, Drs. Stolkowski and Papa, the Dutch study people, even Atomic's theories) should always be viewed with some skepticism. The way studies are designed, it is standard practice to avoid mention of any data that conflicts with the hypothesis of the study and only mention studies that support the hypothesis. Scientists know this and take it into account, but for those of us who are not scientists, it can be extremely misleading. It’s also human nature to want to present your case as compellingly as you can.

--The outcome of any study should be able to be repeated by independent researchers. Timing has been utterly debunked because independent researchers could not repeat Dr. Shettles’ results and in fact found the opposite on several occasions, so it’s logical to conclude that timing doesn’t sway at all and Dr. Shettles’ results were either flukes or must be explained in other ways. Similarly, when independent researchers tried to repeat Stolkowski’s results in sows, they couldn’t do it.

Be aware, though, that it’s not unusual to have studies done by different researchers that point in all different directions. Heart disease is studied way, way more than gender ratio, in larger, better designed studies the likes of which we can only dream of, and yet they STILL get all kinds of different results pointing in different ways. Is an extremely low fat vegetarian diet best for heart disease? Mediterranean? Atkins? The data is inconclusive. Just within the last month or two, we’ve had studies that seemed to indicate exercise may actually make heart disease worse for some people, and that the so-called “good” cholesterol may not be good after all. Please don’t despair or give up on swaying because of conflicting results, that’s just par for the course.

4)Given all that, how can we really know anything about gender swaying at all? Are all studies worthless?

NO. There are some tricks we can use to help discern good data from bad data.

--Accidental data. We get some of our best data entirely by accident, from researchers studying entirely different topics. The Oxford Study and the Nurses’ Study II discussed above, are examples of this. Some of our best data is a byproduct of fertility research. It’s not perfect of course, but much of this info is leagues better than the FGD/Dutch studies and the timing stuff, because it comes from large, doubleblind studies (neither researcher or participant was looking for a particular outcome) and therefore is untainted by either intense gender desire on the part of the participants or bias on the part of the researchers.

Also, we can often use bad data to uncover good data. With the timing studies that used Clomid vs. IUI, since timing has been debunked repeatedly, when we remove timing as a possible variable, we’re left with the probability that Clomid sways pink and IUI sways blue.

--Trends from other studies. We can look for similarities between studies and see if there are any trends. Several studies have demonstrated that myriad things that are detrimental to sperm, sway pink. Things as dissimilar as riding a bicycle, jogging, pesticide exposure, exposure to radiation, heavy metals, various chemicals, anesthetics, and smoking, have all been shown to lower sperm count, reduce sperm quality, and lower the gender ratio (more girls conceived.) Consequently, we can feel quite safe in assuming that things that are harmful to sperm while in a man’s body and lower sperm count prior to ejaculation, tend to sway pink.

With a bit less confidence, we can extrapolate that trend further and assume that things that lower sperm count and are detrimental to sperm even after it’s left a man’s body will still sway pink. Can we KNOW this to be true, not with the data we have, but we can still feel pretty good about assuming that it is and emulating those conditions to the best of our ability.

--Cause and effect. Even though we don’t know all the particulars of HOW gender swaying works, we do have a pretty good handle on WHY. Thanks to the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis and the data we have that shows quite clearly that baby boys need more nutrients from the moment of conception, through pregnancy, breastfeeding, and in fact their entire lives, we can operate under the assumption that a lower nutrient maternal diet prior to conception leads to more girls conceived and vice versa. Quite a few studies support this as well in both humans and other mammals. We don’t really need to totally understand the mechanisms at play, (maybe it’s testosterone, maybe it’s blood sugar, maybe declining fertility, maybe it’s something we haven’t even begun to guess at or all these things working in concert.) We just need to emulate the conditions and alter our diets in the direction of less for girls, more for boys. Mother Nature will take care of the rest.

Conversely, timing as a method of gender swaying makes so little sense that it’s highly unlikely to be true. If your body didn’t have enough nutrients to sustain a boy pregnancy on Thursday, then there’s no way you had enough nutrients to sustain him on Saturday. It would be foolish for the human body to conceive a baby of a certain gender (an enterprise which until very recently, killed many women in the process) based on something so arbitrary as the day of the week you had sex on.

--Biological plausibility. When we look at swaying studies, if some aspect of the study does not add up with the fundamental workings of the human body, then the outcome of the study is meaningless and there has to be some other explanation for the results. We know that it’s impossible for cal-mag-sod-pot levels to vary beyond a very narrow range (except in cases of severe illness or malnutrition so severe you would have made yourself ill to the brink of death) and your body has mechanisms that work to keep the electrolytes within that range...if you eat too much calcium, your body excretes it, and if you eat too little, your body robs your bones and teeth to get it. We also know that X and Y sperm do not have different electrical charges and cannot be attracted by “ions” in the cervical mucus. As a result, the French Gender Diet simply cannot be swaying because of the levels of electrolytes in your blood OR because ions in your CM attract X and Y sperm differently, no matter what the FGD book claims. The diet may very well sway but it’s NOT because of the electrolytes.

pH is another example – yes, there are studies that indicate low pH in the vagina may cause more girls to be conceived, but it’s biologically impossible that X sperm “love” low pH and Y sperm “love” high pH. ALL sperm thrive in pH that is in the 7’s, which is why semen pH and CM at ovulation is in that range. The fluids produced uterus, Fallopian tubes, and even the fluid that emerges with the egg at ovulation, all has pH in the 7’s. This pH idea would be extremely easy for fertility doctors to test for and use and the idea has been touted for decades so they've all heard of it. If there was ANYTHING to it, they’d simply put an egg in low pH solution and dump some sperm in for a girl and vice versa and voila, cheap gender determination that would make them a quick fortune. But they don’t. Fertility clinics have to use Microsort or PGD for gender determination because pH does NOT attract X and Y sperm differently. Low pH kills sperm. Very high pH kills sperm. Medium pH is ideal for sperm, both X and Y, and thus biological plausibility dictates that whatever pH does (and it may well sway in vivo conditions), it’s not by attracting one sperm vs. another.

--Real-world observations. While “anecdotal” evidence is often poo-poohed by the scientific establishment, the actual definition of the word “anecdote” is simply, a case study that hasn’t been published yet. We are ALL case studies and our experiences and observations are just as meaningful and valuable as those of any researcher (and perhaps more so because we have not been indoctrinated with the main****** establishment viewpoint.) The data we are amassing on this site is invaluable for the benefit of everyone and I really encourage everyone to chime in and share their sways, what worked for them, what didn’t seem to work, things they’ve randomly noticed, and so on. Don't be shy! Lurkers, you're welcome here and please post!!

We may not always be (or ever be) 100% mright, but if we don’t try, we’ll never even get close. Every major scientific breakthrough originated from someone who randomly noticed a pattern and started to wonder about it. We have hundreds of minds and lifetimes of experience, here working in concert to draw from.

Remember, no one is going to do this for us – there’s not enough money to be made to offset the costs of the studies, and the interest level just isn’t there. It’s up to us to cut through the BS and sift through the garbage looking for the swaying gold!!

[atomic sagebrush]

http://genderdreaming.com/forum/gend...ys-attack.html

when sways ATTACK!

or, why do people get sway opposites and what can we do about it?

Unfortunately, some sways do go bad and end up bringing us a sway opposite. Swaying does work In defense of swaying Part 1 - Is swaying real?? but not 100% of the time. There are tons of opposites even among the best sways.

If you really truly cannot handle a sway opposite, then you need to investigate high tech or adoption, or postpone TTC until your head and heart are able to handle the possibility.

The least important reason why sways fail, but the first thing most people think of, is lack of compliance. Some people don't want to or can't do all the various sway tactics. And you know what, that's totally, absolutely, 100% ok. You need to put your own personal sanity, well being, family's needs, and your marriage ahead of a sway at all times. After all, we all know tons of people who never do any of this crazy-a$$ stuff and have kids of both genders and there have been opposites with sways that were perfect and in people who swayed for 2 years before getting pg. It may be the only thing you need to do to get your DG is just get pregnant again.

It's YOUR sway and it's up to you to pick and choose from the sway tactics out there. Never feel like your sway will go south if you don't include every OWT or vaguely science-ish tactic ever heard of. Even if you just do one tiny little thing, it's still a sway, it still sways your odds to some extent, even if it's only 1%. Even if you do nothing, you still have a chance at your DG! NO ONE is ever at fault for any sway opposite; if it's anyone's "fault" it's mine and I hope everyone feels free to blame me whenever anything goes wrong - throw darts at a dartboard with my picture on it, stick pins in a tiny atomic sagebrush-shaped voodoo doll, whatever it takes!

That having been said, you have to own your decisions and be able to live with them. If you want to do a relaxed sway, that's great! If you need to get pregnant quickly and have to drop sway tactics, no worries. If you've had enough already and just want to have a baby in your arms, we've all been there. But if you cheat all the time on diet, you have to be honest with yourself, it's not going to be as effective for you as it would be if you were stricter. If all you choose to include in your sway is a wooden spoon under the bed and tighty whiteys, don't kid yourself that your sway is in any way a sure thing - NO sway is ever a sure thing, even the best of them.

Whatever you include in a sway or drop, keep in mind that you're going to have to live with it - will you wake up for the rest of your life in a cold sweat at 3am wishing you had used Acijel?

Some sways may fail is because of what DH brings to the table. If your husband won't or can't sway, there's not a lot you can do about it. Or SHOULD. One of my cardinal rules of swaying is, "If Daddy ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." Pressuring or bullying your hubby into swaying if he isn't interested, is a recipe for marital disharmony. There have been husbands that have gotten so annoyed with the entire show that not only do they refuse to sway, they pull the plug on the whole baby-making adventure and if you can't get pg, you have NO chance at your DG. Others may pretend to go along with it and then once out of eyesight, simply eat what they want, smoke what they want, and release when they want, which is almost worse than if they just refused to go along with it because at least then, you can have a stricter sway in other ways knowing that DH is not helping.

It's very likely that DH is less important than what you yourself can accomplish alone, and many of us have had successful sways with DH that wouldn't do a thing to assist.

Some sways may fail because of things that simply cannot be changed. It may very well be that some of us are just more "set" to produce more of one gender than another. We can change some things, but at the end of the day we've had a lifetime of eating certain foods, doing certain things in our lives, and even our DNA may be working against us to some extent. For a more thorough explanation of this principle, please read this: another way to look at the swaying odds

Some sways may fail because of the effect of swaying on our testosterone levels. Pink swayers, you want lower T levels and by launching into new and exciting projects that are challenging to you, can increase T levels. Blue swayers, feeling overwhelmed, overstressed, and fearing failure can lower T levels. Please read this essay for more detail: Understanding the "Law" of Testosterone Supply and Demand

Another reason why sways fail is BAD INFORMATION. Or NO information. We just don't have enough data at this point to really know or understand how swaying works. We are giving our best guess but we just don't have enough info to go on. Some things seem contradictory and other things we don't have explanations for. Things like blood sugar and hormone levels, not even the smartest researchers on the planet understand how those things even work, let alone interact with the gender ratio. Most of the "data" out there comes from people who have a vested financial interest in presenting a certain explanation of swaying - those who are selling a diet or sway program - and so their studies are pretty suspect to begin with.

And it's probably pretty likely that this state of affairs will continue into the near future anyway - there is very little interest in gender swaying and gender ratio, at least in humans, and you can read more about why that is, here: Understanding Scientific Studies for Swayers

THE MAIN REASON WHY SWAYS FAIL...drum roll please...

....bad luck.

Sorry, I wish it was something more exciting like solar flares or pixie dust, terrorism or alien invasion; alas, no.

Nothing that happens in the human body is ever effective 100% of the time. People smoke their whole lives and never get lung cancer, people eat eggs and bacon every day and live to be 99...yet no one would deny that smoking causes cancer. Even though it doesn't happen every time, overall, if you smoke, you're way more likely to get it than the average person is.

In the case of gender ratio, Mother Nature has a vested interest in making sure that both boys and girls are always being born in some proportion. A species that started having all of one gender just because they ate some salt would have died out a long time ago. The myth of the magic foods

So IF, (and that's a BIG IF) swaying could ever get us to 80%/20% (which is what some of the info on diet seems to indicate) there would still be people having opposites 20% of the time. That's a LOT of opposites. And for those of us with 3,4,5 of the same gender already, if you only swayed on your last child, it doesn't mean swaying doesn't work for you or can't work, it just means that this ONE time, the odds didn't come up your way. You may have done a great sway. You may have gone from 20-80 where you conceived your other kiddos, to 80-20, and then just got unlucky that one time.

Umm, well, then what's the point of even swaying anyway, if it just comes down to luck in the end anyway? Well, if you start off at let's say 75% likely to have Gender A, and only 25% likely to have Gender B, and then by doing a few easy sway tactics, you can get to 55-45, wouldn't you take that, even if you are still more likely to have an opposite?

When I swayed with DS 4 and then DD, I knew I had a better than 50-50 shot at a boy from the get-go. My thinking was, if I could GET to 50-50 from where I was, I'd be thrilled with that and would take the flip of the coin at that point. If you start off with odds of 80-20, you'd have to have 5 kids before getting your DG (on average, and some people would have to go even higher if the dice didn't fall their way). Most people don't want that many kids, so if we can sway those odds to get our DG a little sooner, on kid 2 or 3 or 4, that's great.

Swaying can never, ever, ever be a guarantee, unfortunately. But it can work and it can even work for you after a failed sway.

May the odds be ever in your favor!