A question I get a lot on Gender Dreaming (the website where I answer all your questions about Natural Gender Selection) is what swayers should do when something doesn’t go according to plan. What should YOU do? Maybe you slipped up on diet. Maybe you had sex when you weren’t supposed to, or weren’t able to have it when you intended. Maybe you, your husband, or even your whole family got sick. Maybe it’s just a stressful month and you read somewhere that “stress sways” in a direction you don’t want it to.
People assume they should skip the month and “do better next time”, but is that always the case?
My general rule of thumb about whether to skip a month is this: “If you'll live 1000 lifetimes of regret if you try and get an opposite, then skip the month." People read this and think “but atomic, of course I’ll live 1000 lifetimes of regret if I try and get an opposite, so doesn’t that mean that I actually should skip months whenever I have even the slightest doubt?”
NO!
MOST of the time, I want you to try. When in ANY doubt, try; if you’re thinking “maybe, maybe not,” try. Usually, when you really need to skip the month, you’ll know it with 100% certainty. If you have enough doubt in your mind to reach out to me and ask, it is nearly always the case that I’ll tell you to try. Of all the people who have ever asked me this question, it’s rare that I ever tell anyone to skip a month…and this is mostly blue swayers. Pink swayers, the chances that I’ll have you skip a month over something other than a complete Act of God, are practically nil!
Why? Why am I so emphatic that people not skip months except in rare, extreme cases?
The first reason not to skip months is that people ALWAYS have doubts when it comes to swaying. There is never the perfect month, something always goes wrong, and people who wait for the “perfect” month often end up waiting ages to try. For blue swayers, this means excess weight gain which can affect fertility negatively and may sway pink if the weight gain gets extreme, and for pink swayers, this means excess weight loss which can also affect fertility negatively so much so that it can prevent conception entirely. For some people, excess weight loss and gain can end up so severe that they end up giving up a sway diet entirely and begin doing things that will sway the opposite (losing weight on a more pink-friendly diet for blue swayers and/or resuming extreme exercise programs, gaining weight on a more blue-friendly diet for pink). This is not a rare situation in any way. A substantial amount of sway opposites are in people who did exactly this - swayed too strictly, did not conceive, and then gave up and returned to their previous eating habits. To avoid this, it’s imperative we try to conceive as quickly as is feasible while still making our best effort at swaying via diet. It simply makes NO SENSE to skip months over minor details when in the end, it may make you more likely to give up on swaying and conceive the opposite gender to what you were hoping!
Secondly, waiting for some “ideal” could mean passing up a month you might have gotten your desired gender, in favor of trying in a month that's less ideal. People - and this happens all the time - start off swaying and skip this month or that month for some minor thing, and then several months have passed and they will suddenly panic. They’ve only had a couple “real” BFN (“Big Fat Negatives” - negative pregnancy tests) mixed in with several months they skipped, and yet it really does feel that they’ve been trying for 6, 9, 12 months when they really haven’t. They become so desperate for a positive pregnancy test they end up trying in months that were so much worse than the months they skipped back at the start!! I regularly see people who skipped months over ONE cheat meal in 12 weeks (which is completely allowed!) who will then try in months they’ve done everything wrong. Sometimes they start doing everything in their power to get pregnant immediately - even things that undermine their sway. They return to bad habits, thinking “this is what I was doing when I got pregnant last time.” This ends up with people having skipped months that were really kind of ok , only to try in a month that was vastly inferior just because they'd already been trying quite a while!
So when I say “if you’ll live 1000 lifetimes of regret if you try and get an opposite” please keep in mind that it is entirely entirely possibly to skip a month that you would have had success in favor of a month that is worse than the month you skipped! Swaying is like an iceberg, the stuff we can see is so much less than what is happening under the water. Even if you think you completely messed up, there’s a lot going on under the surface that you can’t know about. Any given month may have been a great month for you to try. No one’s sway has ever come down to a very minor detail, so if something like eating a granola bar or forgetting to eat a granola bar is why you think you need to skip a month, you should absolutely try. Even if it’s a little more than that, in most cases what people believe are complete screw ups are actually not even outside the limits of the diet!
Again, MOST of the time, I want you to try. When in ANY doubt, try. Usually, when you really need to skip the month, you’ll know it.
ABOVE ALL ELSE - if you screw up on diet, or miss a few days of exercise, you DO NOT need to start all over again at 6-12 weeks’ mark. I know this is what some old school sites tell you to do, but it makes NO SENSE. Do you know a single, solitary person on Planet Earth who ate a very restrictive diet (some of those old school sway diets are impossibly restrictive) for 12 weeks, never eating a single morsel that wasn’t on a pitifully short list of rather weird things? Think cranberries, tahini, poached fish, and Mrs. Dash for girls, non-dairy creamer, plain gelatin, hot dogs, and Top Ramen for boys - weird enough so that this type of diet just cannot occur naturally. It simply doesn’t make any sense at all that any of us need to eat that sort of bizarre and unhealthy diet, for 12 weeks plus however long it takes us to conceive, every minute of every day, never eating a thing off that list not even once.
So when SHOULD you skip a month, then?
Pink swayers, the answer is “practically never”. Pink swayers tend to be massive perfectionists, and are overly consumed by small, irrelevant details. It’s actually kind of GOOD for your sway to force yourself to let go of some of those things and accept that your sway will never be perfect no matter how many months you wait. 99 times out of 100, pink swayers who ask me “should I skip a month” should NOT skip a month, and a very large number of people who come to me desperate after having swayed many months without conception, I later find out that they’d been skipping this month or that month for no good reason. That having been said, if you’re someone who wants a girl but has just found out about swaying, or who was swaying on an old school diet and only just found out about the Low Everything Diet, or have been swaying on the standard LE Diet and just learned that you need to switch to our alternate version of LE Diet for those who have PCOS, egg quality issues, insulin resistance, or more than 30-50 lbs to spare, you ~may~ want to take a few weeks to regroup with diet before proceeding. The only exception is if you’re in a hurry to conceive for some reason - particularly women 40+. Time is not on your side, so in that case it’s best to TTC while simultaneously to changing your diet. You may not get pregnant at first, giving you enough time on diet, so all is not lost if you simply don’t have the time to spare.
Blue swayers, the answer is “rarely”. Blue swayers tend to be easily overwhelmed, fatalistic, and prone to feeling defeated by minor things that don’t go their way. It can be good for you to keep unimportant stumbling blocks in perspective as things you can rise above instead of allowing the smallest thing to completely put you off track and convince you that you can’t ever succeed. NO ONE gets it right in every arena, every time! You can still have a boy without doing all the things in the blue sway exactly right and it doesn’t mean you’ve failed if you can’t manage every element. 95 times out of 100, blue swayers who come to me asking if they should skip a month, shouldn’t. I have had blue swayers who went YEARS scared to try because they thought they would never get it right, and a surprisingly large group of people who put off trying so long they ended up having an “oopsie” opposite without getting to sway at all. That having been said, if you’ve only just found out about swaying and/or are following one of the “old school” sway diets, if you or your husband has been sick (beyond just a mild cold - I’m talking fever, throwing up, or a more severe illness), if you are undergoing religious fasting such as Ramadan, or if you or your husband is a very serious athlete in your competition season, in those situations it’s ~probably~ best to skip a month or even two. Again, the exception to this is if you’re 40+ in which case it’s better to just keep trying since time is not on your side, while doing the best you can with your diet.
(brief aside, please note the difference between pink and blue swayers here - pink swayers think “I need to skip a month because I want to have everything perfect and knock this out of the ballpark, so I can be guaranteed a girl” whereas blue swayers think “I need to skip months because this is all too much for me and I can never get it right and because of that I will never get a boy…this just can’t happen for me because I can’t get it perfect.” This is a subtle difference, but it’s very important to understand, so you can avoid the pitfalls of mindset that can wreck otherwise good sways.)
If you’re still not sure if you should skip a month or continue trying, please come find me at Gender Dreaming and I’ll help you make the decision! Looking forward to hearing from you!
I got my daughter after four boys and I’ve helped tens of thousands of people get their dream gender too. I want to help you. No gimmicks, no fine print - all you need to do is SUBSCRIBE. All it takes is a click of a button and you’ll get FREE content from me a couple times a week, with more awesomeness to come!
Thanks for reading Natural Gender Selection with atomic sagebrush! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
If you aren’t ready for that just yet, please check out my FREE blog, which has more information about Natural Gender Selection than you probably ever wanted to know:
Help! Should I wait a month?
Help! Should I wait a month?
Help! Should I wait a month?
A question I get a lot on Gender Dreaming (the website where I answer all your questions about Natural Gender Selection) is what swayers should do when something doesn’t go according to plan. What should YOU do? Maybe you slipped up on diet. Maybe you had sex when you weren’t supposed to, or weren’t able to have it when you intended. Maybe you, your husband, or even your whole family got sick. Maybe it’s just a stressful month and you read somewhere that “stress sways” in a direction you don’t want it to.
People assume they should skip the month and “do better next time”, but is that always the case?
My general rule of thumb about whether to skip a month is this: “If you'll live 1000 lifetimes of regret if you try and get an opposite, then skip the month." People read this and think “but atomic, of course I’ll live 1000 lifetimes of regret if I try and get an opposite, so doesn’t that mean that I actually should skip months whenever I have even the slightest doubt?”
NO!
MOST of the time, I want you to try. When in ANY doubt, try; if you’re thinking “maybe, maybe not,” try. Usually, when you really need to skip the month, you’ll know it with 100% certainty. If you have enough doubt in your mind to reach out to me and ask, it is nearly always the case that I’ll tell you to try. Of all the people who have ever asked me this question, it’s rare that I ever tell anyone to skip a month…and this is mostly blue swayers. Pink swayers, the chances that I’ll have you skip a month over something other than a complete Act of God, are practically nil!
Why? Why am I so emphatic that people not skip months except in rare, extreme cases?
The first reason not to skip months is that people ALWAYS have doubts when it comes to swaying. There is never the perfect month, something always goes wrong, and people who wait for the “perfect” month often end up waiting ages to try. For blue swayers, this means excess weight gain which can affect fertility negatively and may sway pink if the weight gain gets extreme, and for pink swayers, this means excess weight loss which can also affect fertility negatively so much so that it can prevent conception entirely. For some people, excess weight loss and gain can end up so severe that they end up giving up a sway diet entirely and begin doing things that will sway the opposite (losing weight on a more pink-friendly diet for blue swayers and/or resuming extreme exercise programs, gaining weight on a more blue-friendly diet for pink). This is not a rare situation in any way. A substantial amount of sway opposites are in people who did exactly this - swayed too strictly, did not conceive, and then gave up and returned to their previous eating habits. To avoid this, it’s imperative we try to conceive as quickly as is feasible while still making our best effort at swaying via diet. It simply makes NO SENSE to skip months over minor details when in the end, it may make you more likely to give up on swaying and conceive the opposite gender to what you were hoping!
Secondly, waiting for some “ideal” could mean passing up a month you might have gotten your desired gender, in favor of trying in a month that's less ideal. People - and this happens all the time - start off swaying and skip this month or that month for some minor thing, and then several months have passed and they will suddenly panic. They’ve only had a couple “real” BFN (“Big Fat Negatives” - negative pregnancy tests) mixed in with several months they skipped, and yet it really does feel that they’ve been trying for 6, 9, 12 months when they really haven’t. They become so desperate for a positive pregnancy test they end up trying in months that were so much worse than the months they skipped back at the start!! I regularly see people who skipped months over ONE cheat meal in 12 weeks (which is completely allowed!) who will then try in months they’ve done everything wrong. Sometimes they start doing everything in their power to get pregnant immediately - even things that undermine their sway. They return to bad habits, thinking “this is what I was doing when I got pregnant last time.” This ends up with people having skipped months that were really kind of ok , only to try in a month that was vastly inferior just because they'd already been trying quite a while!
So when I say “if you’ll live 1000 lifetimes of regret if you try and get an opposite” please keep in mind that it is entirely entirely possibly to skip a month that you would have had success in favor of a month that is worse than the month you skipped! Swaying is like an iceberg, the stuff we can see is so much less than what is happening under the water. Even if you think you completely messed up, there’s a lot going on under the surface that you can’t know about. Any given month may have been a great month for you to try. No one’s sway has ever come down to a very minor detail, so if something like eating a granola bar or forgetting to eat a granola bar is why you think you need to skip a month, you should absolutely try. Even if it’s a little more than that, in most cases what people believe are complete screw ups are actually not even outside the limits of the diet!
Again, MOST of the time, I want you to try. When in ANY doubt, try. Usually, when you really need to skip the month, you’ll know it.
ABOVE ALL ELSE - if you screw up on diet, or miss a few days of exercise, you DO NOT need to start all over again at 6-12 weeks’ mark. I know this is what some old school sites tell you to do, but it makes NO SENSE. Do you know a single, solitary person on Planet Earth who ate a very restrictive diet (some of those old school sway diets are impossibly restrictive) for 12 weeks, never eating a single morsel that wasn’t on a pitifully short list of rather weird things? Think cranberries, tahini, poached fish, and Mrs. Dash for girls, non-dairy creamer, plain gelatin, hot dogs, and Top Ramen for boys - weird enough so that this type of diet just cannot occur naturally. It simply doesn’t make any sense at all that any of us need to eat that sort of bizarre and unhealthy diet, for 12 weeks plus however long it takes us to conceive, every minute of every day, never eating a thing off that list not even once.
So when SHOULD you skip a month, then?
Pink swayers, the answer is “practically never”. Pink swayers tend to be massive perfectionists, and are overly consumed by small, irrelevant details. It’s actually kind of GOOD for your sway to force yourself to let go of some of those things and accept that your sway will never be perfect no matter how many months you wait. 99 times out of 100, pink swayers who ask me “should I skip a month” should NOT skip a month, and a very large number of people who come to me desperate after having swayed many months without conception, I later find out that they’d been skipping this month or that month for no good reason. That having been said, if you’re someone who wants a girl but has just found out about swaying, or who was swaying on an old school diet and only just found out about the Low Everything Diet, or have been swaying on the standard LE Diet and just learned that you need to switch to our alternate version of LE Diet for those who have PCOS, egg quality issues, insulin resistance, or more than 30-50 lbs to spare, you ~may~ want to take a few weeks to regroup with diet before proceeding. The only exception is if you’re in a hurry to conceive for some reason - particularly women 40+. Time is not on your side, so in that case it’s best to TTC while simultaneously to changing your diet. You may not get pregnant at first, giving you enough time on diet, so all is not lost if you simply don’t have the time to spare.
Blue swayers, the answer is “rarely”. Blue swayers tend to be easily overwhelmed, fatalistic, and prone to feeling defeated by minor things that don’t go their way. It can be good for you to keep unimportant stumbling blocks in perspective as things you can rise above instead of allowing the smallest thing to completely put you off track and convince you that you can’t ever succeed. NO ONE gets it right in every arena, every time! You can still have a boy without doing all the things in the blue sway exactly right and it doesn’t mean you’ve failed if you can’t manage every element. 95 times out of 100, blue swayers who come to me asking if they should skip a month, shouldn’t. I have had blue swayers who went YEARS scared to try because they thought they would never get it right, and a surprisingly large group of people who put off trying so long they ended up having an “oopsie” opposite without getting to sway at all. That having been said, if you’ve only just found out about swaying and/or are following one of the “old school” sway diets, if you or your husband has been sick (beyond just a mild cold - I’m talking fever, throwing up, or a more severe illness), if you are undergoing religious fasting such as Ramadan, or if you or your husband is a very serious athlete in your competition season, in those situations it’s ~probably~ best to skip a month or even two. Again, the exception to this is if you’re 40+ in which case it’s better to just keep trying since time is not on your side, while doing the best you can with your diet.
(brief aside, please note the difference between pink and blue swayers here - pink swayers think “I need to skip a month because I want to have everything perfect and knock this out of the ballpark, so I can be guaranteed a girl” whereas blue swayers think “I need to skip months because this is all too much for me and I can never get it right and because of that I will never get a boy…this just can’t happen for me because I can’t get it perfect.” This is a subtle difference, but it’s very important to understand, so you can avoid the pitfalls of mindset that can wreck otherwise good sways.)
If you’re still not sure if you should skip a month or continue trying, please come find me at Gender Dreaming and I’ll help you make the decision! Looking forward to hearing from you!
I got my daughter after four boys and I’ve helped tens of thousands of people get their dream gender too. I want to help you. No gimmicks, no fine print - all you need to do is SUBSCRIBE. All it takes is a click of a button and you’ll get FREE content from me a couple times a week, with more awesomeness to come!
Thanks for reading Natural Gender Selection with atomic sagebrush! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
If you aren’t ready for that just yet, please check out my FREE blog, which has more information about Natural Gender Selection than you probably ever wanted to know:
atomic sagebrush’s Complete Swaying Library
And if you have questions, I am available to answer them at Gender Dreaming!
Because even a miracle needs a hand!