Hi again! I'm hoping to post twice today, so I'm going to break up my personal update into two pieces.
From the middle of February to the middle of March, I was on a swaying break. My thinking was, I already have a child with an early December birthday and since my o date would have put me giving birth very close to Christmas, that just isn't my ideal situation, so I decided not to try and conceive that month.
Instead, I conducted an experiment into just how much diet really does affect my pH and CM. I was also very curious to see if just going onto a more relaxed diet would help me to ovulate. So I began to eat breakfast again and I also allowed myself to have some meat on occasion, a small amount once a day. My weight went up from 124/125 to a consistent 128.
Almost immediately, I began to see huge changes. I suddenly had more energy, more focus, and my mind was much sharper. Unfortunately, I became more argumentative and opinionated and unable to let things go. I had trouble sleeping and I would wake up in the middle of the night stressed out about things. I even started driving more aggressively. That is generally my normal personality, but I didn't realize just how much the lower testosterone diet had changed me until I started eating meat again!!
In the midst of all this, I did ovulate, even though I didn't cut back on my breastfeeding at all. This was very encouraging to me because it was nice to see that 3 pounds of weight and eating breakfast and a little meat really could help me return my cycle to normal. In fact, it was an unusally long ovulation, with pretty major cramping lasting an entire week. I came to find out that this was probably caused by the vitex I had begun taking the month before. (That was the second month I had taken the vitex, but nothing happened until I relaxed my diet.) I am waiting to see if AF will make an appearance this month, I am hopeful that she will.
During the ovulation week, I had tons of CM but I was actually quite surprised to see that my pH didn't budge, it stayed around 4.5 with the occasional reading of 5. This was quite encouraging as well. That tells me that maybe once our pH changes, it might tend to stay that way, unless we make a dramatic change in diet - good news for all of us swayers who have cheated a few times here and there on our diets!!
Although I absolutely hated wasting that big beautiful ovulation, I'm glad it worked out that way because I doubt I ever would've relaxed my diet if I had been TTC that month. So we definitely gained some valuable information.
Anyway, this is a recycled post from the gender swaying board - some of you may have seen it already, but I did think it might be somewhat helpful to help people envision how swaying might work.
Another way to look at the swaying odds...
Often we hear of gender selection being compared to a flip of a coin. We’ve heard it said so often that it’s hard to step away from that all-or-nothing expectation, and consequently when we sway, it’s tough to envision anything other than heads or tails, black and white…or in our case, pink or blue. “If you do these things, you are guaranteed your gender.” And so when we see people IRL who seem to eat right off the boy diet and DTD at all the wrong times but still have girls or vice versa, it’s confusing, scary, and makes us want to give up on swaying all together.
But swaying is so much more complicated than flipping a coin. Swaying isn’t all or nothing, it’s a complicated bunch of physical processes that work together in unpredictable ways we don’t even fully understand, ways that may very well be different in each person.
Perhaps a better way to envision the odds is to picture a die (a die is one of a set of dice, so picture just one dice) with a lot of sides on it. (Anyone who’s ever played the board game Scattergories will know just what I mean, or picture a die somewhat like a soccer ball.). Imagine that each of us carries with us our own personal die that we’re born with, and that die has like 20, 50, 100, or 1000 faces on it. Some of those faces are pink and some are blue, and when we conceive a baby, we roll that die and whatever color comes up on top is the gender we conceive.
Each of the faces on the die corresponds to a different thing that can affect gender. Almost certainly, genetics play a part in gender selection, so some of the faces on the die are colored pink or blue and we cannot change them, these are just traits we are born with. Some people probably have more unchangeable blue faces, some have more unchangeable pink faces, and other people have an equal number of each. It even seems possible that some people have more unchangeable faces overall than others do, and their bodies may just be more genetically programmed to produce children of mostly one gender than another person’s would be.
But other sides of the die do change color. They flip back and forth depending on variables in our diet, timing, and environment. Sometimes we have more pink faces on our die, and sometimes more blue faces. These are what we are aiming at changing when we sway, to get as many faces as we can to turn pink or blue and keep them there as long as we can while we roll the die.
Some of these faces are easily changed, others are much tougher. Some of the faces are linked together, so changing several at the same time works much better than trying to do only one. In fact, the only way to change some of the faces is by changing enough of the others. Other faces are easy for one person to change but more difficult for others, probably due to genetic factors.
Unfortunately, since we are all born with different dice, we don’t know exactly if what works for one person will always work for another. All we can do is look at what seems to work best for the majority of people over the course of time, and try and emulate that.
Even after the best sway imaginable, there is no way that all of our die’s faces will be pink or blue. There are some faces that are unchangeable, and others that were just too difficult, and still others that we don‘t even know how to change yet. We can do our best to change as many as we can, but there will be at least some chance that the opposite color will come up when we roll. Even if we changed ¾ of our faces pink, ¼ will still be blue. Even in people who are ¾ pink will have boys ¼ of the time.
Most of us only roll our die only 2 or 3 times over the course of our lives. It isn’t hard to imagine that just from sheer bad luck, that some of us will happen to have more blue or pink faces during those times, even if every other month out of our life we had more of the opposite. For others, they may be in that ¼ who rolls blue even though their odds were mostly pink.
You just can’t predict by looking at one or two people, what things work best to sway. Because yes, your friend may eat lots of salt and have girls, but she may have so many other pink factors that her overall pink odds were still higher. Or for me personally, I DTD before I ovulated, so according to Shettles, I should have daughters. I don’t, but that doesn‘t mean that Shettles is completely wrong in every way and that timing doesn‘t matter. I simply had more blue factors than I did pink those months, and my roll came up blue.
Only over the course of time, and by watching a lot of people sway (both successes and failures), will we gradually be able to learn what things work best and for who. Until then, we have to accept that there will be exceptions, there will be opposites, and even though there are failed sways, it doesn’t mean that we should give up on swaying and refuse to even try.