1) We can sit around speculating all we want about "maybe it's this or that" but we simply do not know. That having been said, it makes no sense whatsoever that it's "eating at this hour or that hour" because the most likely explanation as to why swaying works is that it gives a baby of a certain gender a better chance of survival and growing up to pass down genes to future generations. So if you don't have enough calories coming in for a baby boy, why in the heck would that change because you ate dinner at 8pm instead of 6? These very fine details simply don't add up to affecting a sway, AND they contribute to control freakishness by encouraging you guys to be thinking about your sway every minute of every hour of every day.
What makes the most sense is just that eating less often helps your sway (because your blood sugar is lower on average across the days and weeks). The ONLY reason we push back breakfast is that's just the easiest time for most people to miss a meal, or push it back by a few hours. There is nothing magic about missing breakfast, it's that we are eating less often OVERALL. Some people find it easier to skip dinner. That is ok. Others are incapable of missing dinner (ME) and I had to eat pretty much last thing before going to bed or I couldn't sleep. I still got a girl doing that so whatever that program you saw on TV was saying, it certainly didn't undo my sway by eating at 8-9 PM and since tons of other people have also done that (including some blue swayers who ended up with girl opposites) I can pretty definitively say that no ones sway is wrecked by eating before bed.
This type of CONSTANT thinking, theorizing, fine tuning your sway is absolutely the worst possible thing you could be doing right now. Seriously. The more you guys focus on theories and suppositions, the more you go down these rabbitholes where you're basing sways on totally hypothetical musings instead of just doing what works for most people most of the time. Please just do what has worked for people and let go of this controlling mindset because it is ruinous to sways.
2)Please do not use maca. If I had thought maca was a good idea, I would have told you to use maca. I do not have anyone use maca (many blue swayers want to use maca, because some sites claim it sways blue and also because it's supposedly "good for fertilty") because it has caused all sorts of weird side effects, even crazy things like hallucinations and head-to-toe itching, and like literally every other hormonal herbal supplement, can actually make it take LONGER for your cycle to resume. Plus, you are nursing and there is inadequate information about safety when nursing.
Additionally, if your period came back within 7 days of using maca, then it was either a) not actually a period and you caused yourself to start bleeding by suddenly lowering your estrogen levels and triggering a breakthrough bleed that was not your period at all since it did not follow ovulation, or b)your cycle was already on its way back. Your period doesn't just "come back". In order to have a true period, you first must ovulate (and it takes a good week-10 days minimum for an egg to develop to the point it can be ovulated.) Then, 10-14 days later, your period would come. So unless you had already ovulated, your period could not have come back 7 days later from Maca. If that was a true period, you had already ovulated on your own, and if it was breakthrough bleeding, that wasn't a period anyway and taking Maca had hormonal effects on you - the same type of effects that may keep ovulation away even longer.
3)Yes, artificial sweetener is fine. You can try a wholegrain muffin with artificial sweetener if you'd like, but of course the cooked fruit will itself have sugars in it (fresh fruit is better than cooked fruit in terms of blood sugar) and if you use dry fruit like sultanas or dates, they are VERY sugary and are probably best used in extreme moderation. Since you're on the alt. diet more as a preventative than due to active PCOS, having muffins now and then, even once a day, is probably ok but I'd not treat it as a free for all and absolutely do not have them between meals, on ly with meals.