Using Your Body Temperature to Choose the Gender of Your Baby

It's important to know your own fertility signs when you plan to choose the gender of your baby. You'll be able to pinpoint your ovulation and use your hormone levels to give you the best chance of getting a boy or girl. Your basal body temperature helps you to understand exactly when you're ovulating each month.

An Overview

If you've tried to conceive before, or if you've used natural family planning/fertility awareness, you're probably very familiar with charting your temperature. Don't worry if this is all new to you, though. It's pretty easy to understand!

Your body has a range of "normal" every day. Using a special thermometer (called a basal thermometer) you can track your temperature in small increments. After you ovulate your body has a surge of a hormone called progesterone. This hormone helps sustain a newly conceived baby -- and it also makes your temperature shift higher. It's a subtle shift, but if you've been charting out your temperatures, you'll see a clear upward shift on your chart.

This upward shift means ovulation has occurred. You'll find that you tend to ovulate around the same time every month. You may have been taught that you ovulate on day 14 of your cycle, but that might not be true. Women tend to ovulate at a regular point of their cycle, but it's not always the "textbook" day 14. For instance, I usually ovulate on day 12 or 13 of my cycle, and have slightly shorter than "textbook" cycles. Many women have slightly longer cycles.

Conceiving a Boy or Conceive a Girl

So how does this help you choose the gender of your baby? It's now believed that hormone levels in the mother play a strong role in the gender you conceive. Hormones highest right at ovulation are estrogen and testosterone, and both favor getting pregnant with a boy.

Hormones highest a few days before ovulation are luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone. These hormones are thought to favor girl conceptions.

X and Y sperm may thrive in the environment highest in their favored hormones, and your egg may be more receptive to one type of sperm over the other if the sperm have come through these hormones.

Using your temperature to learn when you ovulate helps you to time baby-making sex so you can have the X or Y sperm start their journey to the egg when hormone levels are most favorable to them.

It's Hormones More Than Timing

We used to think that Y sperm (boy sperm) were faster than X sperm (girl sperm) but that theory has mostly been disproven. Now we know the reason that timing may matter is because of those hormone levels.

There are other things you can do to help change your hormone levels, such as strength training or a lot of cardio exercise, depending on what gender you want to conceive.

Understand your cycle and focus on getting your hormones right, rather than worrying about which sperm is swimming faster!