My baby girl sway so far...advice??

[Aliroqui]

I posted this under girl sway, but was advised this may be a better place, so I copied it here!
My baby girl sway so far...advice??
I'm currently using the mirena, having it removed Apr 2. I did tons of research in Februaury, came up with my game plan and started March 1. Here's what I've got:
Supplements
1 baby aspirin
450 mg saw palmetto
2 calcium citrate tabs
1 magnesium tab

I have terrible allergies, so I already take sudafed+allegra daily

Diet:
Skip breakfast as long as possible then:
large (2 cups) of warmed milk with a splash of coffee and 2 equal packets
Lunch:
flavored yogurt (with fake sugar)
cup of berries
Dinner:
1-2 cups rice cooked with unsalted butter
Greek yogurt (with fake sugar)
Evening:
2 cups warm milk with cinnamon and equal

I keep my calories around 1200 and run 3 x a week. If I have calories to spare, I'll have a light beer or 2. I tried to fatten up a bit to have a couple pounds to spare during my sway I'm planning on bd 2-3 days before predicted O, no idea on release/abstain. I've used the opk every other day since march 3, all negative.

With the mirena, I haven't had periods in years, yet I started a full on period yesterday? Is it the SP? If its really AF, I'm pumped, that will put my ovulation in the new moon! only other thing, I bought an ionic hair brush

Please chime in on anything you might tweak and why...
Thank you ladies in advance!

[Mulberry Smurf]

Are you getting enough calories?? Remember no period = no chance of pregnancy xx

[stephk]

Hello and welcome

you dont need to take calcium and magnesium supplements for a pink sway.

That is not enough food. 1200 even without exercise would leave you starving. What you are eating also sounds really unhealthy - it sounds like you will just be living on milk, yoghurt and fake sugar.

I would start by reading up on the LE diet. There are no forbidden foods if this is your concern. The limits of theLE diet are:
1500-1800 cals
20-30% cals from fat (so 30g?-60g fat)
40-50g protein
As long as you are coming within totals you can eat anything you want, if that is your worry. Also low carb fruit and veg are totally free, no need to count cals, protein or fat. There are other fruit and veg where you count cals but not protein or fat. My advice is to fill up on fruits and veg at every meal - you need to eat fruit and veg. The rest is up to you. Atomic has written a meal planner and there are also 'what are we eating' threads which will hopefully help you.

If you are able to swap butter for margarine that is better for the sway but dont feel obliged to if you love butter. I only have butter, I cant stand margarine. You also dont need to add fake sugar to every meal, unless you enjoy this.

Also - the running 3 times a week is said to be moderate and therefore boy frequency. I am not sure how long you are running for. It is recommended for the average person to do an hour of cardio 6-7 times a week if you are going to incorporate exercise.

I will leave it for someone more qualified to give advice on AF as mine is MIA so I cant comment!!

The big thing - I beg you to please eat more, you will waste away and it is very unhealthy to cut out so many food groups. you are not supposed to have no nutrients at all, just lower nutrients than before. We only want to decline in condition a little, not to be completely starving and unhealthy. you risk not ovulating and then you wont be able to get PG at all.

Also putting on weight to lose weight has backfired on a few people.

I dont think atomic would recommend a 2-3 day cut off because its hard to pinpoint O, so the recommendation is to BD every 4 days so there is only one attempt in the fertile window.

I am sure others more knowledgeable than me will chime in but just watned to give a quick and hopefully helpful response.

[marriedmomof2]

glad you moved it over most ladies are going to tell you exactly what lilth and I said in the other post, so you might want to clarify if you decide to change anything other wise you are going to get a lot of the same advice again

[carmella_marie]

Id drop the calcium and magnesium, as nutrients are known to sway blue.

I don't know if Allegra works the same way as Benadryl/Zyrtec and you shouldn't be taking Sudafed too many days in a row as it's been linked with strokes in women I think.

YOur diet doesn't sound like enough calories, it doesn't even sound like 1200, and you should be on the 1500-1800 range.. If you eat too little your body will go into starvation mode and you will stop ovulating. I would say your diet is high in dairy which may also be too much fat and we want a low fat diet when TTC pink. There are no magic foods! Dairy and calcium do not necessarily sway pink!!!

Moderate exercise sways blue, you'll want to either do no exercise or 6plus weeks of. 6-7 days a week 60 mins cardio or more.

Cut off also doesn't sway. My DS is a 4 day cutoff. Best results are one attempt at +OPK and if opks don't work for you, bd once every 4 days. Frequency--abstain vs frequent release--isn't getting great consistent results and I don't think it matters much. You can get sperm count down other ways like licorice root.

[marriedmomof2]

.

[atomic sagebrush]

Saw palmetto makes mirena ineffective!!! I hope you are using protection when you were having sex and if not take a pg test right away. you can be pregnant even if you have what seems like normal AF.. Taking an OPK every other day does not mean you haven't ovulated.

Your cycle may not be the same after this month so I wouldn't panic if your O falls in a different part of the month next month.

This is more of an old-school sway than the type I recommend and to be honest there is a ton of stuff I'd do differently. Above all else I would urge you to increase exercise to more like 5-7 times a week and also increase calories to prevent excess weight loss. that is one heck of a restrictive diet to try and be on in the long term.

The Sudafed needs to go, it's been linked with strokes in young women taking it for extended periods of time. the Allegra already does what the Sudafed would do anyway.

[Aliroqui]

Ok, looks like maybe I'm not on the right track. So frustrating. Myfitnesspal says I only need 1600 calories to maintain my weight, so I know I won't do 1500-1800, I would gain weight! I'll change it to 1400-1500. I think I'll just cut exercise for now. I can't commit to that many hours of exercise . I'm going to keep up the calcium, because the spreadsheet, and several studies seem to back it up. Plus I don't like milk, never drink it, and I have two boys . I'll cut out the sudafed on days I can breathe Now, what to eat? I've created excel spreadsheets listing what acidifies, increases progesterone, is low in potassium, etc. My diet was primarily based on this spreadsheet, but then I noticed it lined up pretty well with FGD. I haven't been able to find details on LE, Is it eat anything as long as you follow parameters for fat/protein/calories? If so, I'll go with what I've got so far, and modify it to fit those parameters. Thank you ladies so much again. I'm super excited to get started.

[atomic sagebrush]

I think MFP chronically underestimates the amount of calories people need to maintain. I would not go off their recommendations based on our experiences here on this site because they are recommending super low cal intake for people.

LE Diet Nutshell version is here. http://genderdreaming.com/forum/tryi...l-version.html

I am working on the LE Diet FAQ part 2 and it will answer a lot of your concerns, so I'm just going to post the first part for you below. First LE Diet Faq is linked at beginning of the essay below.

[atomic sagebrush]

For a link to the first LE Diet FAQ it’s here: http://genderdreaming.com/forum/tryi...-diet-faq.html
What kind of results is the LE Diet getting?
The LE Diet has gotten about 65% success rate. This has stayed consistent over time with only minor statistical variations in either direction. http://genderdreaming.com/forum/tryi...readsheet.html
Is that ALL?
A few people have seemed disappointed by the 65% number. Not me! We are talking about being able to alter the gender ratio by a few easy to make changes in diet. Henry the 8th would have killed for this information! And as those of us with 3-4-5 or more boys already know, not all of us are starting off from 50-50 chance of either gender. We have numbers that show odds of a second, third, and even 4th boy are higher than they “should” be http://genderdreaming.com/forum/gend...body-know.html
Additionally, our blue swayers on HE Diet have also been getting a steady 75% and this has gone as high as 80% on several occasions. Since most of us boy moms tend to follow a more HE-type diet naturally http://genderdreaming.com/forum/tryi...-our-boys.html that indicates that those of us with many boys already are going from as much as 80% likely to conceive another boy to a minimum of 65% likely to have a girl. This is a huge variation and your odds are MUCH better on LE Diet than just eating your normal diet.
There are other sites and salesmen out there who claim an impossible 95% success rate, some using diet, others using other methods (including magic). These people are dishonest. If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
However, there are studies out there that seemed to have an 80% success rate with diet. But we are not doing a scientific study here. We are not omitting the people who didn’t do things “the right way” from our statistics. Gender Dreaming is meant as a support site, a safe place where we can come together as friends to talk about gender swaying, gender desire, and anything else. We include EVERYONE who posts a sway in our numbers, whether they swayed hard or just a little. http://genderdreaming.com/forum/tryi...readsheet.html We are trying to avoid the climate on some of the other sites where people’s sways are picked apart and there’s some big competition to see who can do the strictest sway (leading to more severe gender disappointment, not to mention dishonesty and unreliable results). It actually gets us a better quality of data because if everyone did the exact same thing for their sways, it becomes extremely difficult to pick out the trends of what is actually working vs. what is not.
In the most recent “Dutch” study that claimed 80% success rate, 172 couples started the process of joining the study, 22 dropped out right away (probably because the diet was too difficult), and 150 remained. They then did an additional second experiment using a new group of 50 women. Of the 150 women in the first group, plus the 50 women in the second group, only 32 women were even able to fulfill the requirements of the study to be included in the results. That group got 80% success, but a method that only 1/6 of the people who attempt it can even do, is really USELESS in the real world. (It also cost 1450 euros – that’s over $2000!!!) And it does not really truly mean that this diet got 80% for everyone who tried it, does it? If I were to go through and cherry pick my data to select only the people who did LE Diet “my” way (neither too strict nor too lax), I could make my numbers look like that too, and in fact we have gotten 80% and above with people on LE Diet for more than 12 weeks and with exercise. But I WILL NOT artificially inflate numbers to make swaying look more effective. We are dealing with life altering decisions – the decision to add another child to the family, the decision between PGD/IVF and swaying – these need to be based on what the average person can reasonably expect and not some number that was manipulated within an inch of its life.
Furthermore, we are here not to get some tiny fraction of people the highest possible success rate while others sit around in despair. We want the most people to get daughters with the least amount of misery, and so there is a balance to be struck - “perfection” vs. REALITY. Percentages of success can be highly misleading things, because if a sway tactic, no matter how elegantly designed, is undoable for the average person (because remember, with the “mineral balancing” diets, if you go off the diet even just one measly time in 6-12 weeks, according to them you have ruined everything) it’s worthless because of all those people who just can’t stick to a diet without, like, EVER cheating. The all-or-nothing nature of the mineral balancing diets leads people do believe that if they can’t do everything perfectly, they may as well do nothing, and so tons of people who could have successfully swayed with a more relaxed approach, don’t follow ANY diet and end up getting opposites.
If only 32 people out of 200 are able to follow a mineral balancing diet well enough to be included in a study, even if 80% of those 32 people got girls (about 26 people), that is an unacceptable amount of people who can’t do the diet to start out with. If 200 people are able to stick with the LE Diet in some form or another even with occasional or not-so-occasional cheats, and as our stats indicate, about 65% had girls, that's 130 girls - a HECK of a lot more girls overall. And that is IF you accept those numbers from the Dutch Study at face value, but everyone please note that they were NOT doing just diet, they were also doing timing – aka one attempt – which has gotten as high as 75% for us so it is VERY likely that they would not get the same results with just diet alone anyway.
You can rest assured that our numbers are real world, real live people who sometimes have bad days and fall short on diet. I did not go through and pick and choose only the best of the best sways to include in our results. You can read the posted sways and verify what every swayer in our stats did. You can even message them if you want to. Our numbers are different, not because our results are inferior or bad, but because they are BETTER quality of data.
Which diet should I follow then??
I can all but guarantee that after reading the above there are at least SOME people who are thinking “well gee whiz 80% sounds good to me, I’ll just do one of those mineral diets but unlike all the lazybones who couldn’t stick to it, I WILL”. But remember, that study was NOT just diet alone, but also included timing – now as we know, timing doesn’t sway, but one attempt, which is always included in strict timing methods, has gotten about 75% success rates for us with a sample size of over 100 people (when you’re dealing with a sample size of 26 people, getting 80% is well within the statistical variation of 75% range). So it’s very likely that a person doing diet + one attempt can expect higher than 65%, and if you do exercise as well, the exercise has been getting 90% (I expect this number to drop as more people add it in but it is still a strong pink sway tactic). I believe it’s reasonable to assume that swayers who do diet, exercise, and one attempt can expect success rates that are higher than 65% - and without shelling out 2000 bucks for the privilege.
I know there are still some out there who aren’t convinced. If you ARE convinced, skip down to the rest of the essay where I talk about a lot of other (much more interesting) stuff and sorry to belabor a point!
The case against the IG Diet – In our stats http://genderdreaming.com/forum/tryi...readsheet.html people following the IG Diet (mostly in the first year of the site) got about 42% success for pink (58% boys). People following the IG Diet for boys (again, mostly in the early days of the site) had 48% success for boys (52% girls). You would have had a better rate of success following the IG BOY Diet than the IG Girl Diet, at least among this group of people. http://genderdreaming.com/forum/ttc-...swayed-gd.html Aside from that, stats go up and stats go down, but the level of misery that people experience IGD (both for pink and blue) is NOT worth it even if it was getting better results.
The case against the FGD -
The “80%” number that is sometimes attributed to the FGD is misleading. The original studies done by the FGD people were not good studies, they just went back over old food diaries and added up cal-mag-sod-pot levels and ignored all other nutrient data. Then they designed a diet based on mineral content that people supposedly had good results on (just as with the Dutch study, anyone who was not able to stick to the diet 100% was omitted from the results unlike our numbers where everyone is included), but those diets are different in many ways, not just in mineral levels. It has never been proven to my satisfaction that cal/mag levels are swaying and in fact I think the data points in the opposite direction.
I do think the FGD and the Dutch diet based on the FGD CAN sway, but it’s not because of mineral levels, it’s because of the differences in the diets themselves. A diet with substantially different calcium vs. potassium levels, is also going to have substantially different EVERYTHING levels. Meat, fruit and vegetable intake, and yes even dairy itself is limited on FGD. And while I have not seen this diet firsthand myself (because I lack the $2000 LOL), I have it on good authority that calorie intake, protein, and fat intake in the Dutch study diet is very similar to that in the LE Diet because it’s based on the high fiber, higher carb, lower fat, and very low saturated fat Dutch National Diet found here (this is a PDF): http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...62922401,d.cGU

Cal-mag or no cal-mag?
I think I’ve gone on pretty much to the brink of obnoxiousness about this but I do still get questions asking me am I SURE? REALLY, REALLY SURE? And while I am never “sure, really really sure” about ANYTHING when it comes to swaying and question everything constantly, I AM sure that the cal-mag idea cannot work in the way that the boosters of the FGD/IGD/Dutch Diet claim it does, firstly because it’s based on a really dumb idea to start with (that animals that are so far removed from mammals that they don’t even reproduce in remotely the same way, can tell us anything about how to alter gender ratio in human beings) and secondly because it’s biologically and historically impossible http://genderdreaming.com/forum/tryi...roversial.html (this is a three part series, read ALL three, and there’s some pretty good discussion after the essays too, particularly the third one). Lastly, we have evidence showing that cal-mag actually can sway blue both in studies and in data compiled from IG. Several of us got girls without cal-mag after getting sway opposites where we were taking gobs of the stuff. Calcium is not a magic bullet for pink, no way, no how.
That having been said, recently our stats have seemed to show an increased rate of success for cal-mag http://genderdreaming.com/forum/tryi...readsheet.html and people have again been asking me if they should include cal-mag on the basis of these numbers. NO. First of all, I am not even sure where these newer numbers are coming from. I don’t compile the statistics because it is unethical for me to do so and plus I don’t have time anyway (and really appreciate the hard work of the ladies who do them), but I haven’t been having ANYONE use cal-mag for DW. I do allow people to include it for DH because the data I have shows no difference in gender ratio with husbands using it and not using it and since some people believe in cal-mag as a magic bullet, I figure it can’t hurt anything. The stats do not say if it’s DH using it, DW using it, or both, how much, when it was taken, etc. So to take a look at that number in light of all the evidence pointing away from the use of cal-mag for DW and reintroduce it for women, I believe is a major step in the wrong direction.
There is also an issue where the strictest of the strict people include EVERYTHING, so it ends up being that things that do not even sway, even sway blue, can look more effective than they really are simply because uberstrict people use them while doing overall more effective sways. This is especially true of things that do not inhibit conception – if a sway tactic doesn’t prevent pregnancy, naturally it is kept in the mix even as other things are dropped. Since calcium does not inhibit odds of conception, it is often kept in a sway after all other sway tactics are dropped. Since a longer time on diet has been shown to be more effective, I believe some of our stats (cal/mag and ions, to be exact) are coincidental and not cause/effect. Besides that, until recently the success with cal-mag was pretty much the same as the overall stats of the site. I think this is a minor statistical variation and do not recommend taking cal/mag supps for DW and do not foresee doing so in the future, either.
In order for me to begin recommending calcium and magnesium for pink, is that some researchers from a legitimate university, should take two groups of several hundred women doing nothing else to sway (including diet, they should just be eating a normal diet), give one cal-mag and then the other not. If cal-mag does anything, then there should be significantly more girls conceived in the cal-mag group. Then they need to repeat the experiment, preferably by switching the two groups. The second group also should have substantially more daughters on the cal-mag. Or I would also accept the first experiment repeated 3 times by different, equally legitimate researchers and let me reiterate – a sample of 32 people does not suffice, these experiments need to be done in several hundred people. Till then, I think the facts are against calcium and swaying.
Aside from all that, IF calcium even sways, HOW? The theories originally underlying the FGD and how it worked, are biologically impossible. You can’t alter the levels of calcium/sodium in your blood****** without being very ill to the brink of death. The Trivers Willard hypothesis predicts that moms who are in declining condition have more girls – IF (BIG IF) taking a massive dose of cal-mag really truly sways, it’s very likely because it’s harmful to your health or fertility in some way. The same is probably true for DH as well. Unlike diet and exercise which taps into “Nature’s Way” of gently declining fertility as a natural birth control method when times are hard, the mechanism for how high levels of calcium might sway (IF it does) is a mystery. Since calcium supplementation has been recently linked to considerably higher rates of heart disease in both women and men, it is not a sway tactic that I think is worth any level of risk (because remember, I think it’s neutral for DH and sways blue for DW in sane levels). I have moved away from recommending cal-mag to men over 45, I’m borderline on it for men 35-45 and no longer use it for any men who have history of heart disease.
-So then how about if I just take magnesium?
Several people have asked me, well if calcium sways blue, I’ll just take magnesium. NO. For starters, the Oxford Study found higher intake of ALL nutrients, including magnesium, to be associated with more boys conceived. And secondly, the only reason why magnesium was ever included in the FGD to begin with was to improve the absorption of calcium. So if you’re not taking calcium, then it’s POINTLESS to bother with magnesium. You’re taking a risk for your sway (more nutrients) and for your health (because high levels of magnesium are dangerous and one lady on InGender actually ended up in the hospital from too much magnesium) for no benefit (because it was supposedly the calcium doing the work, the magnesium only helped the calcium).