WHO in the world is atomic sagebrush??? (Part 1)

…or, “why should I take gender swaying advice from a chick with 4 sons??”

UPDATED 10-3-22

The atomic sagebrush story actually doesn’t begin with me or even with the website Gender Dreaming, where I spent over 10 years working with many thousands of gender swayers, answering over 100,000 posts in the process. It begins with the creation of the InGender site back in 2006. InGender was originally a group of ladies who came together on a message board for support with gender disappointment and it branched out from there. Some of these ladies ended up using the newest technology (PGD and Microsort) to get their desired genders while others scoured studies and articles looking for natural methods (beyond Shettles, who nearly everyone had tried and failed at).

There were actually dozens of people who researched swaying in the early days, including a biologist who had access to a lot of awesome studies in the days before studies were widely available online, and a woman who singlehandedly translated the entire French Gender Diet from French into English!! The data that these intrepid gals came up with, gradually over the course of several years, evolved into the IG-style sway. It included timing (either cutoff or O+12 for pink, having sex at ovulation for a boy), diet (mostly centered around the mineral-based French Gender Diet but also including some other elements), hormones (raising progesterone for pink, raising testosterone and estrogen for blue), pH (lowering pH for pink, raising it for blue), ions (negative for girls, positive for blue), and supplements (which were said to help with pH, diet, ions, and hormones.)

The IG philosophy is (altho that has changed a bit lately, with diet being given slightly more importance than it once was) that all these things swayed equally and should be given equal weight, and if you did not want to include one of them, that would ruin your sway. In sways that don’t include all 7 sway factors are not even included in the statistics and so when you look at the IG stats, always keep in mind that many, many sways are not included in this data. (including everyone whose husbands wouldn’t sway!!)

Most everyone who has researched gender swaying online is quite familiar already with the IG-Style sway so I won’t elaborate any more than that.

Anyway, that brings me, to, well, me. atomic sagebrush. I am just a mom like you guys and like the ladies who did the original IG research. I have no fancy credentials. I had two sons in my early 20’s without swaying at all. I had zero gender disappointment with either and really loved being a boy mom and still do. In fact, I particularly wanted a boy with my first son, and happily got him. I had always wanted a big family of 5 or 6 and just assumed like we all do, that there would be at least one girl in the mix. Unfortunately, life sort of got in the way of that plan and we kept postponing having more kids until we had a bigger house, more money, better timing, but it never happened, and eventually it became glaringly apparent that if we waited any longer for those things to fall into place, there would BE no more children. By that time, 13 years had passed since I had my last child.

We started trying with the notion that we may not even be able to conceive (I was 36 years old and it had been a long time since I had been pregnant!) Someone had once told me about Shettles timing, and altho I still did not have a strong gender preference, I did hope that I could have one more child and that it would be a girl, because for personal reasons, I did not want to raise a boy as a functional only child, but was ok with having just one girl. It seemed like one more pregnancy, one girl – it would be perfect!! So I sort of vaguely did Shettles timing and happily conceived after only 2 months of trying. EVERYTHING in my life was blue-friendly but I had never heard of “swaying” at that point or anything related to it.

At this point I still did not have a strong gender preference but the pregnancy was very different from my first two and the symptoms, old wives tales, and the Chinese Gender Predictor ended up convincing me that my baby was indeed a girl and set me up for HUGE devastation at my ultrasound. I felt like a world-class idiot – I mean, my uterus was like 2 days away from retirement and here I was going through pregnancy and labor again and for WHAT? Another BOY? And I had to have another baby to give a son a sibling?? I felt like the butt of a very large joke and that everyone was laughing at me (and some were, I’m sure, which didn’t help!) I was really not in a very good place but somehow I knew I couldn’t be alone. I Googled, “I can’t believe I am having another boy” and immediately found InGender.

Anyway, long story short, I soldiered on thru my gender disappointment with the help of my IG friends, ended up making peace with it before my third son arrived, and things were ok. I did still hope that since I was going to try to conceive one last time for my son’s sake (I think boys should come in pairs, like shoes) that this final time I would get lucky and get a girl. And so I decided to look into this “swaying” business. I thought it sounded pretty silly and farfetched at first, basically voodoo wrapped up in science talk, parts of it seemed nonsensical to me, and it did not match with my lifestyle because I have always eaten tons of dairy. But I didn’t want to just discount it out of hand either. People really DID seem to be having some measure of success with it beyond 50-50.

I concluded, IF swaying could possibly be true, there HAD to be some reason why – swaying would have to help human survival in some way or else it never would have evolved/been designed into us by God, and I started to do a little research with that truth in mind. Almost immediately I came upon the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis and the Maternal Dominance Hypothesis. The ladies of IG had never heard of the TWH and they all but discounted the MDH but I quickly began to see how all of the traditional sway tactics either a)didn’t actually work at all and even might sway in the wrong direction OR b) were really just tapping into these phenomena.

Shortly thereafter I also came across some research done by a biologist which indicated that levels of blood glucose could indicate the gender of offspring that a woman might conceive and the Oxford study was published which seemed to TOTALLY support everything I was beginning to realize had to be true about gender swaying – that a lower cal, lower protein, lower fat, lower nutrient diet, with blood sugar levels kept on the low side, possibly with lower sodium intake, and where the mother was in declining condition and maybe even losing weight, swayed pink (Low-Everything), and a High-Everything diet seemed to sway blue.

I was taking the earliest steps along the path to what would eventually become the type of sway I recommend. I got very active on the InGender sway board and I was even a forum mod for awhile. IG adopted several of my recommendations on exercise, losing/gaining weight, and skipping/eating breakfast. Despite this, I was getting ready for my sway at this point and I just wasn’t ready to turn my back on all the traditional sway tactics. So I included some things like the IG supplements, cutting back on caffeine, and limiting sodium in my sway and the results yielded my fourth son.

I strongly feel that the main reason why my sway failed was because I was taking too many supplements – but I got scared. I wanted to hedge my bets. I took a month off of swaying to gain some weight back to lose again (thinking at that time that timing weight loss was important – it isn’t) and I got pregnant that month of course, so not only was I chock full of supplements but I had gained 3 lbs right before conceiving too. My son is amazing and I have no regrets about that but I did have regrets that I hadn’t tested the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis the way I really wanted to.

Don’t worry, this story has a fairy tale ending with the appearance of a real-live princess! Part Two coming next!

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