I often hear from people who are having a difficult time gauging their ovulation. Or, they are able to gauge their ovulation but they are finding that it is not happening at a convenient time. I've had people ask me if it was possible to eat a certain type of food to either bring ovulation on or to delay it. I actually heard from someone who said: "my husband is away on a work project. I feel like I am going to ovulate within the next couple of days. But my husband is not due home until late next week. Someone told me that if I ate large amounts of sweet potatoes or yams this would delay my ovulation. We want a boy so I know that I need to wait until after ovulation to have sex to try to conceive. Should I try eating tons of yams or sweet potatoes? Would this delay my ovulation for a week or so?"

Honestly, I would not advocate this practice. I am not a doctor or health care practitioner. However, I do know that it is believed that early cultures used sweet potatoes and other foods as a birth control because they had nothing else. With that said, the reason it is believed that this worked was because this was believed to release progesterone, which in addition to estrogen is one of the ingredients in birth control pills. But here is the problem. (And in my opinion, it is a major problem.) Would you want to take birth control pills or something similar to it when you are trying to conceive? I would not think that you would want to do anything that would affect regular, healthy, and predictable ovulation. Today, we have modern technology which has made this practice obsolete. And that is probably not a bad thing.

Your ovulation is brought about by the rise and fall of your hormones. This is a very delicate balance. And some women have problems with fertility because these hormones get out of balance. So, if you are in a situation where you are ovulating regularly, then why would you want to put this cycle in jeopardy? This is only my opinion, of course, but my rule of thumb is that you shouldn't eat or consume anything (including some supplements) that would have any affect on your hormones which might in turn affect your ovulation and your fertility.

I do understand that planning your conception can seem like a long process, especially since you only get a couple of days per cycle in order to have success. But frankly, if you experiment and affect your hormones and your ovulation cycle, then you may be causing delays or irregularity that gives you even less days to work with and also makes your ovulation irregular and harder to gauge. The thing that this woman had going for her was that she had a good handle on when she ovulated. This was an advantage that I felt shouldn't be jeopardized. Besides that, she hadn't mentioned if she was at the right PH in order to conceive a boy. Because if she were acidic during conception, a girl baby was more likely anyway. So maybe the better suggestion would be to not eat large amounts of any certain foods, but instead to begin gauging and tweaking her PH as needed and then to know that she would have the best chance the next month. Or, if she was lucky enough to be alkaline, she could travel to her husband and conceive where he was traveling. I know that this probably wasn't what she wanted to hear, but I wouldn't advocate doing anything that can affect your ovulation. This is too precious a commodity when you are trying to conceive.

You really need three things to chose your baby's gender.  Timing, PH, and the right sexual positions. If you need help coming up with the best tactics at the best time for your situation, I've put together a few websites that might be useful.  There's more detailed explanations that might make this process a little easier.  You can check out http://conceive-a-boy-baby.com  or  http://conceive-a-girl-baby.com  depending on which is applicable to you.