By Atomic Sagebrush
This story actually doesn’t begin with me, it begins with the creation of the InGender site back in 2006. InGender was originally a group of ladies who came together on a message board for support with gender disappointment and it branched out from there. Some of these ladies ended up using the newest technology (PGD and Microsort) to get their desired genders while others scoured studies and articles looking for natural methods (beyond Shettles, who nearly everyone had tried and failed at).
Altho Tamara has become ubiquitous with IG swaying, there were actually dozens of people who worked on the sway in the early days, including a biologist who had access to a lot of awesome studies in the days before studies were widely available online, and a woman who singlehandedly translated the entire French Gender Diet from French into English!! The data that these intrepid gals came up with, gradually over the course of several years, evolved into the IG-style sway. It included timing (either cutoff or O+12 for pink, BD at O for a boy), diet (mostly centered around the FGD but also including some other elements), hormones (raising progesterone for pink, raising testosterone and estrogen for blue), pH (lowering pH for pink, raising it for blue), ions (neg for girls, pos for blue), and supplements (which helped with pH, diet, ions, and hormones.)
The IG philosophy is (altho that has changed a bit lately, with diet being given slightly more importance than it once was) that all these things swayed equally and should be given equal weight, and if you did not want to include one of them, that would ruin your sway. In fact, I have been told that sways that don’t include all 7 sway factors are not even included in the statistics and so when you look at the IG stats, always keep in mind that many, many sways are not included in this data. Most everyone is quite familiar already with the IG-Style sway (and if you are not, the IG FAQ has been posted in the Dream Members section for IG-style swayers to use when the IG site is non-functional) so I won’t elaborate any more than that.
Anyway, that brings me, to, well, me. I am just a mom like you guys and like the ladies who did the original IG research, no fancy credentials. I had two sons in my early 20’s without swaying at all. I had zero gender disappointment with either and really loved being a boy mom and still do. In fact, I particularly wanted a boy with DS 1 and happily got him. I had always wanted a big family of 5 or 6 and just assumed like we all do, that there would be at least one girl in the mix. Unfortunately, life sort of got in the way of that plan and we kept postponing having more kids until we had a bigger house, more money, better timing, but it never happened, and eventually it became glaringly apparent that if we waited any longer for those things to fall into place, there would BE no more children. I went to work for 2 years to get us into a good financial situation to help support having more babies, and by that time, 13 years had passed since I had my last child.
We started TTC with the notion that we may not even be able to conceive (I was 36 years old and it had been a long time since I had been pregnant!) Someone had once told me about Shettles timing, and altho I still did not have a strong gender preference, I did hope that I could have one more child and that it would be a girl because for personal reasons, I did not want to raise a boy as a functional only child, but was ok with having just one girl and it seemed like one more pregnancy, one girl – it would be perfect!! So I sort of vaguely did Shettles timing and happily conceived after only 2 months of trying. EVERYTHING in my life was blue-friendly but I had never heard of “swaying” at that point or anything related to it.
At this point I still did not have a strong gender preference but the pregnancy was very different from my first two and the symptoms/OWT and of course our beloved Chinese Gender Predictor ended up convincing me that my baby was indeed a girl and set me up for HUGE devastation at my ultrasound. I felt like a world-class idiot – I mean, my uterus was like 2 days away from retirement and here I was going through pregnancy and labor again and for WHAT? Another BOY? And I had to have another baby to give a son a sibling?? I felt like the butt of a very large joke and that everyone was laughing at me (and some were, I’m sure, which didn’t help!) I was really not in a very good place but somehow I knew I couldn’t be alone. I Googled, “I can’t believe I am having another boy” and immediately found InGender.
Anyway, long story short, I soldiered on thru my GD with the help of my IG friends, ended up making peace with it before my third son arrived, and things were ok. I did still hope that since I was going to TTC one last time for my son’s sake, that this final time I would get lucky and get a girl. And so I decided to look into this “swaying” business. I thought it sounded pretty silly and farfetched at first, basically voodoo wrapped up in science talk, parts of it seemed nonsensical to me, and it did not match with my lifestyle because I have always eaten tons of dairy. But I didn’t want to just discount it out of hand either. People really DID seem to be having some measure of success with it beyond 50-50.
I concluded, IF swaying could possibly be true, there HAD to be some reason why – swaying would have to help human survival in some way or else it never would have evolved/been designed into us by God, and I started to do a little research with that truth in mind. Almost immediately I came upon the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis Trivers and the Maternal Dominance Hypothesis http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/…/ep0196107.pdf. (these two theories are said to be in disagreement but I think they really support each other) The ladies of IG had never heard of the TWH and they all but discounted the MDH but I quickly began to see how all of the traditional sway tactics either a)didn’t actually work at all and even might sway in the wrong direction OR b) were really just tapping into these phenomona.
You can read my blog from when I was doing this research here:https://www.genderdreaming.com/forum/scie…ypothesis.html and a brief explanatory essay about Trivers Willard herehttps://www.genderdreaming.com/forum/gend…ypothesis.html
Shortly thereafter I also came across some research done by a biologist studying Trivers Willard which indicated that levels of blood glucose could indicate the gender of offspring that a woman might conceive,http://www.cabnr.unr.edu/nres/news_s…px?StoryID=251 and the Oxford study was published You are what your mother eats: evidence for maternal preconception diet influencing foetal sex in humanswhich seemed to TOTALLY support everything I was beginning to realize had to be true about gender swaying – that a lower cal, lower protein, lower fat, lower nutrient diet, with blood sugar levels kept on the low side, possibly with lower sodium intake, and where the mother was in declining condition and even losing weight, swayed pink (Low-Everything), and a High-Everything diet seemed to sway blue.
You can read my thought processes in my blog, but I was taking the earliest steps along the path to what would eventually become the type of sway I recommend. I got very active on the sway board and I was even a forum mod for awhile. IG adopted several of my recommendations on exercise, losing/gaining weight, and skipping/eating breakfast. Despite this, I was getting ready for my sway at this point and I just wasn’t ready to turn my back on all the traditional sway tactics. So I included some things like the IG supplements in my sway and the results were, DS 4.
I strongly feel that the main reason why my sway failed was because I was taking too many supplements – but I got scared. I wanted to hedge my bets. I took a month off of swaying to gain some weight back to lose again and I got pg that month of course, so not only was I chock full of supplements but I had gained 3 lbs right before conceiving too. My son is amazing and I have no regrets about that but I do have regrets that I never got to test the TWH the way I really wanted to.
Fast forward a few years later, and atomic did get to test out the TWH and she did conceive her little girl! We now create swaying plans based upon this theory and all information contained on the GenderDreaming.com site is based upon this. Our results have been excellent and we are happy to help you conceive your dream gender too!