Originally Posted by
atomic sagebrush
Please don't try Babydust Method.
I regularly have people show up on here who have been trying for a very long time on BDM. Haven't you been trying for quite some time?? Now is when we start DROPPING things that do not work and cut odds of conception, not adding them.
All Babydust Method is, is a woman who stole our one attempt several years after we came up with it, went out and dug through studies till she found one (done in Nigeria, BTW) that seemed to support both timing and one attempt, and wrote a book about it. On her Facebook page, I am told she regularly deletes any negative responses from people who got opposites. (please note, that is hearsay, but it came from people who seem otherwise reliable and have no vested interest in debunking her)
Timing is the single most studied aspect of swaying by far. If there was anything to it, we'd know beyond a shadow of a doubt. Every study done on timing by a reputable source that determined the actual day of ovulation using blood tests or ultrasounds did not find that timing worked. Now ordinarily I'm supportive of people doing timing if they want (not Babydust though, which uses some really bad techniques that lower odds of conception too far) but if you've been trying for a while, and also given your history of having trouble keeping weight on, I just can't recommend it for you.
But to answer your question about OPK, you cannot tell based on when you get your darkest OPK, when ovulation occurs. If that's what the Babydust people are claiming, it is untrue. You will ovulate an average of 36 hours after your FIRST positive OPK (anywhere from 8-48 hours, even up to 72 sometimes) even if you get a darker one later on. Your body sends itself a message with LH and it "hears" that message when it is "whispered" even if it starts "yelling" later on. The problem is, the amount of time varies by the month. There is no reliable pattern relating from when your OPK goes positive, to when it's at its darkest, to when ovulation occurs. Some months you may have 8 hours before O, other months it may be 72, and there's no predictability to that. (OPK are just not reliable to the level we might like them to be.)
So my advice is, if you really want timing, get a Clearblue monitor, and then have your attempt on the day of the second flashy. That's still a cutoff. Be aware, though, that you can have more than 2 days of flashy, and you can also go straight to peak, so have a plan in place for what you want to do in that case.
