TTC girl question💖

[MumEC]

Hi Atomic!

I have been lurking around your site since I had my 2nd DS 3 years ago and DH and I are now thinking this is the year we will try for our 3rd, hopefully a DD🤞🏻. When I conceived DS1 and DS2 it was textbook boy sway (unintentionally) I am a total foodie, constant snacker and tea lover! both boys were conceived after DTD frequently bang on ovulation!

So i have bought cranberry supps and OLE for DH although not started taking them, I have started the LE diet this week which is a bit of a shock as I am used to snacking all day, my weight is around 52kg and I am 5ft so I am worried I will lose too much weight with all the cardio- I usually cycle 15km twice weekly and I did so while conceiving my boys so I have added in walking/running also.

My question is however, I have been doing a lot of reading online regarding gender sways and there was a study done in 2010 in the reproductive biomedical journal, which concluded that high calcium levels, along with low sodium levels and conception taking place 3-4 days prior to ovulation gave a pretty good success rate in the conception of girls- I am just interested in your thoughts and why you dont recommend taking calcium supplements when TTC? I am maybe missing something you have posting already explaining this so I am sorry if that is the case!

there is so many conflicting advice online my head is spinning and this will be my only chance to sway so I dont want to make any mistakes!

[atomic sagebrush]

Please bump this for me, it's much longer than I expected. If you could post the link to that particular study that would be great. I've read it before but I can't get it to come up in a reasonably timed search so I can discuss it with it fresh in my mind. Suffice to say I have always left cal-mag supplements at your option. I don't believe in them, got two boys while taking them and all four of my boys with tons of dairy, gave it all up to get my girl, but I have always allowed people to use them if they want to provided they don't use Vitamin D at the same time.

Please do not give your husband both cranberry and OLE. It is one or the other, not both.

[treens]

Wishing you best of luck!

Just wanted to add my 2 cents. I had a girl, then boy, then girl all not knowing about swaying. Then swayed boy, girl, girl using swaying.

What I found for me was really the food and when i ate both when swaying and looking back at non sways.

for girls I only ate 2-3 meals a day no snacking no breakfast with a long fast through the night.
for boys I ate breakfast and and snacked and was never hungry

Just thought I would let you know what worked me or what i think is really important.

[MumEC]

Hi Atomic!

here is the link to the article-


https://www.rbmojournal.com/article/...549-3/fulltext


Thanks treens, that is really reassuring and hopeful as that was my exact eating habits when I conceived both my boys, I ate all day, thankfully I have a fast metabolism so I find it hard to put on weight! I have to say I am finding it hard getting enough calories in 2 meals a day as I tend to fill up really quicky! was never one for big meals just constant snacks and small portions!

[atomic sagebrush]

That's the Annet Noorlander study. I'm very familiar with that, of course. I have had several clients who paid the money - she charges over 2000 dollars for a diet and some blood tests - and then could not get pregnant with that method (some people stopped ovulating totally because the diet was so restrictive), some had miscarriages that they worried had been caused by the diet because they were so rundown and low in weight, and some had opposites anyway. Noorlander was very rude to them and blamed them for their opposites even though they say they did the diet as it was written (and had done the blood tests that showed their minerals were allegedly in the "right" zone.)

She cut massive numbers of people out of her "study" (air quotes because it's really not a study if you do it to prove your revolutionary method of doing X, Y, Z is true - after all we've seen so many companies over the years do exactly that, including the tobacco companies who had plenty of studies that "proved" smoking was healthy!) when they couldn't follow a super strict diet OR get pregnant with Shettles timing method, OR even if people did those things, and their mineral levels did not fall into this very narrow range. So right from the jump, she eliminated gobs of people for whom her method did not work. If the majority of people cannot stick with, or get pregnant while using, the supposed "revolutionary method", right then and there it's a method that simply doesn't work! A method that works needs to end up with conception for everyone who uses it, AND then after that point, a preponderance of people getting the gender they want.

Now, I don't believe in the mineral stuff AT ALL (more about that in a moment) but even if it did work in the way she claimed it did, if only a few people can get pregnant using any swaying method, then it is pointless and useless for everyone else. I can't tell you the number of people who have wasted years out of their limited fertile lifespan chasing some ridiculously strict sway tactic, only to give up and think "I just can't sway" and then have an opposite. I am not here to get some tiny percentage of people the highest possible success rate (and let me just stress, her methods are NOT the highest possible success rate, not at all) while telling everyone else "too bad, so sad". I am here to get the most daughters for the most people. I'll give you some hypothetical numbers to illustrate - Even if her method was 90% effective (which it isn't and she doesn't claim that - or she didn't in the past) and only 10 people out of 100 could successfully conceive with that diet, that would be 9 girls conceived. Everybody else would just be out of luck, left on their own to hope for the best. Even if Gender Dreaming was only 60% effective (and our results are much better than that, 70% or better depending on commitment and sway tactics used) and 100 out of 100 people got pregnant, 60 people would have daughters. Again, these are just easy to understand numbers to illustrate the point that if people can't get pregnant, get kicked out of a study or have to move on from Annet Noorlander's clinic because they can't conceive with her diet, then it's all pointless.

Additionally, the numbers in her study are misleading bordering on deceptive. It is literally not possible for your body to go out of that very narrow range of minerals. If you do, you DIE - like, literally die. People's mineral levels do not go out of that range unless they are on their deathbeds. She's simply giving a NORMAL range of minerals and claiming that people in low normal have one gender and high normal another...but the range is only a few increments apart from each other. Additionally, she never proved that the people who had the "wrong" mineral levels did worse on the diet than people who had the "right" mineral levels did. She just cut them out of the study. For all we know, at least some of the people who followed the diet the best who were cut, and people who did badly on the diet who were left in the study.

If that seems implausible to you, it isn't. We have had several people do mineral diets, including a medical doctor who had access to as many tests as she cared to run, and they tested their blood before, during, and after doing a Noorlander-style mineral diet. Much to everyone's surprise, the levels of minerals that they were avoiding often stayed exactly the same, and in several cases, actually went UP. Levels of things they were eating or taking tons of, actually decreased. This is because of something called homeostasis (you can Google this to see the full explanation of how it works.) Your body does not "like" for its levels of the things it needs to be out of wack, so it has mechanisms that control for that. The human body will absorb more from diet when it's low and will start to rob its bodily stores to keep the levels the same. It will excrete more, and absorb less, to keep the levels the same. Nothing changes.

If the mineral diet snake oil salesmen really wanted to prove minerals swayed, they'd simply test people's mineral levels before and after conception, WITHOUT doing a diet, and see what gender their baby was. Then, if that seemed to work, and people with different mineral levels had different genders, THEN have people do a diet, or take supplements, and see if their mineral levels even changed in the ways predicted they would. Then, finally, test people using this diet to see if a) their mineral levels did change on diet and b) this led to the gender of baby she predicted it would.

But Annet Noorlander didn't do that. Instead, she did a very complex study instead of a series of very simple ones (and cramming timing into it, which is the most thoroughly studied and debunked aspect of swaying, so there is no conceivable reason to test timing at the same time as diet, and merely makes the study's outcome even MORE complicated instead of less) and she did it in order to sell $2000 dollar diets to people. ANY of the people who claim minerals are what sway, could simply do the two studies I have mentioned above - blood tests before conception to see gender outcome, and a mineral diet + supplements to check for mineral levels in the blood - but none of them ever do, even though these studies are obvious and easily done. (I would do these kinds of studies in a HEARTBEAT if I had the ability to!!)

This is why I like the mice study I'll post for you in my next message - everything in the diet was the same except the calcium, and we could see in that case that the mice who ate low calcium had more girls, thoroughly debunking the idea that high calcium swayed pink. This IS in fact possible, indeed, easy to do in humans using supplements. It just doesn't make any sense for researchers not to do the most basic and simple to do study, unless the researchers weren't actually trying to prove anything definitive about minerals. People selling mineral diets WANT the data to be very fuzzy so they can keep selling their product. The last thing they want is to prove that minerals are not what sways (or worse, that it sways the opposite direction, which I believe that it does) The Oxford study, which I'll mention in my next post, was the best study ever done on gender ratio and gender because it was an inadvertent finding done by researchers who were not selling anything, and it found that women who went on to have more boys, ingested more nutrients across the boards, including calcium and magnesium.

Now, because diet actually CAN sway, it is the case that sometimes people manage to stumble their way into diet helping sway for them, but it doesn't mean that it has anything to do with the mineral levels. I have been told that Noorlander's diets are actually very similar to mine. Her pink diet is very low cal (in fact, TOO low cal as many clients will stop ovulating on it) and low fat and protein. When I was back on the Ingender site, I watched the people who were doing the mineral diets as I was trying to plan my sway (which ended in DS 4 because I did too much of the recommended IG stuff) I noticed that the women who ate a lot of food - like drinking a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs and chicken breasts and huge bowls of fettuchini with butter and parm cheese and low sodium tahini and raspberry jam sandwiches, that sort of thing - still had boys, and the women who ate very little just because the mineral diets are pretty unappetizing, had girls.

It is my complete belief that the mineral diets do not work as advertised, not because of mineral levels, but because of "everything else levels". They CAN work when people simply hit on an LE approach and then when they get a girl, they believe it was because of the minerals when it wasn't. At this point we have hundreds of people who replied to our stats analysis and thousands of people who swayed on Gender Dreaming and didn't reply to our questionnaire but I still know the outcome of their sways, who got their desired gender WITHOUT doing the minerals. Including a fair number of people like me who have already had opposites on mineral diets. This is inexplicable if it is minerals that are swaying. Our results would be 50-50 instead of significantly better than 50-50 every year of the site.

Very long story short (too late) at this point there are thousands of us, myself included, who after having gotten BOYS with the mineral stuff, gave it all up to get our girls. I got my daughter with the lowest dairy intake both my husband and I had ever had and a high sodium intake, after getting two sons with calcium supplements, and limiting my sodium with my 4th boy. If the mineral diets were true, this just couldn't be the case. At worst we would be getting 50-50. But for 13 years now we have beaten 50-50 and since about 2015, we have been 70% or better every year. If minerals were swaying, our results would just straight up suck.

But again, if you want to do the calcium, go ahead! Just don't take that Vitamin D with it.

[atomic sagebrush]

So now, to answer your original question:

I do not at ALL think cal-mag makes a stronger sway. I don't think they work at all for pink (and actually have blue swayers take them or drink full fat dairy to get boys.) As I already mentioned, I got my 3rd and 4th boy taking the cal-mag, and with my 4th I also limited salt. My husband and I have always been huge dairy eaters. In my life, and in my online groups of mom friends, I have seen how people eat when they get boys and girls and this was one of the very first things that didn't add up to me - people who had all girls already saying over and over again "but I don't even EAT dairy normally, why do I have all these girls" and vice versa. If it truly was minerals that were swaying, we shouldn't ever see a woman who already has 5 girls scratching her head and wondering what the deal was since she hates dairy and never even eats it.

But this goes far beyond anecdotes. 75% of all the people on earth are lactose intolerant, and yet have about 50-50 boys and girls wherever you go. In fact, the Scandinavian countries where people eat the most dairy, have the most boys, and people of black African heritage have the most girls, despite their being lactose intolerant and actually having a gene that makes them retain more sodium than other ethnicities do.

The people who originally made the first "French Gender Diet" ages ago simply went through and cherry picked from this country or that country and held up certain nation's diets as "proof" that it was minerals that swayed. I actually have both the original, translated book and another American book with the same diet, and this was exactly how they sold their case. Never once did they mention the vast numbers of people worldwide who are lactose intolerant and whose cultures do not ingest dairy foods.

The mineral diets just do not add up scientifically. The homeostasis factor - where levels of minerals in our body stay the same no matter what, unless we are very ill or even dying - is not accounted for. Neither is the fact that they based their original diet on animals like sea slugs and frogs - animals that do not even reproduce in the same way human beings do and some of whom could actually change gender depending on mineral levels. That mode of reproduction has nothing to do with humans at all and is not in any way correlated to mammals. It's just not supported by basic biological fact.

I have helped tens of thousands of ladies get their girls without calcium (because so many of us had opposites with them) and we have had great results - in fact, the more people have done things "my" way, the better our results got for both pink and blue.

So, then, why do some people feel they've seen success with people taking cal-mag?

Firstly, what does happen is that because they're easy things to do, and do not cut odds of conception, many people take them including people who have been going on swaying a very long time. People drop everything else, waste away and become skeletons on horribly strict diets (there are diets far stricter than the LE Diet out there) and keep taking the cal-mag. The results we can see are not scientific, they can be skewed and things that don't actually sway can ~seem~ like they're swaying because they're just in the whole package. So dieting a long time while taking cal-mag can end up with the minerals doing nothing or even swaying blue, but "hitchhiking" on the back of the diet. We have actually gotten very similar results with things that cannot possibly sway, like psychic readings and spoon under the bed.

Additionally, the mineral diets themselves, which most women do in addition to taking the supplements, are very restrictive and are often lower in fat, protein, and calories. It's the differences in diet that sway and not the minerals themselves. During my time on InGender, there were LOTS of women who did not diet and simply took the mineral supplements. These ladies had overwhelmingly boys. There were also women who did the high dairy diet and took the supplements, but ate tons and tons of food - a gallon of whole milk a day, 6 eggs a day, tahini and raspberry jam sandwiches on low sodium bread, huge salads with craisins and chicken breasts, big bowls of pasta with low sodium alfredo sauce, etc - and they also had overwhelmingly boys. (I remember being absolutely shocked at some of these sways failing before I had done my own research and could understand what was happening.) The women who succeeded with the mineral diets and supplements were usually eating very lightly simply because the InGender diet is absolutely awful and very hard to stick with.

The sites that peddle mineral diets all know this already, so they try things like telling people "but you took the wrong kind of calcium" yadda yadda. They grasp at straws to explain why swaying with the mineral diet doesn't reliably work and to incorporate the pH stuff, which also doesn't work, into their mineral sways. If everyone started using calcium citrate tomorrow they'd still have similar results and then they'd be telling people "not THAT calcium citrate, you have to use the calcium citrate of this brand with this dose at this %. They do all this pretzel bending because they insist on telling people that swaying can be 100% if you do it right, and anyone's sways that don't work is their fault. They make the sways so ridiculously complicated no one can ever do them right so there is always something to blame it on. It's quite a racket, really.

Most studies out there that purport to support the mineral diets are done by disreputable sources or have questionable methodology. Keep in mind that some of these people are selling gender swaying methods based on cal-mag to people, or they want to in the future, like Noorlander, and so they have a lot of motivation to do these types of studies. Scientists can basically make studies come out however they want to, either by repeating an experiment repeatedly till it comes out how they wanted from random chance, and then publishing only that final experiment as their study, or by messing around with statistics to highlight points in time where what they want to see was momentarily true (imagine testing something for 12 months, and then in every month but June the results were not what you wanted, but then only publishing the findings from June, if that makes any sense) There is currently a crisis in science right now over these practices even from highly reputable sources, so take studies done by any but the best of sources with skepticism.

There are many studies done that find the opposite of what the mineral diets claim. Our best one is the Oxford study (done by reputable researchers, who weren't even studying gender ratio and so they had no motive to make their results come out any particular way) which found that women who ate more nutrients across the boards, including calcium and magnesium, had more boys. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2602810/

And there's this study, also done by reputable researchers, that showed mice fed low calcium diets had more girls (and this study is very well done, because unlike many of the studies done in mineral diets where the subjects ate totally different diets, the diets varied ONLY by calcium intake and nothing else): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ar...l.pone.0041402

That one is a pretty dense read so I screenshotted the relevant bit here: mice study screenshot.jpg

So the science is not at all settled on minerals at all, and based on my observations and research, both pink and blue swayers are way better off just ignoring the entire thing and focusing on changing their eating patterns and overall nutrient intake instead.