How to Create Your Own Food Journal
This is primarily a note for myself, so I can remember the steps to update the food journal I created for my wife, but I thought I'd share it in case others fine it useful. I've found that creating a book on CafePress and having it shipped to yourself is way cheaper than having a document wire-bound at FedEx Kinko's... but CafePress hasn't made the process very easy to find, or straightforward.
A few years back, my wife participated in a cleanse diet led by holistic nutritionist (and friend) Kelly Hoogenakker, owner of Fresh Ground Health. I'm oversimplifying it, but the cleanse consisted primarily of the following:
- Adding good food to your diet
- Loads of fruits and veggies, the more variety the better
- Organically grown foods
- Whole grains
- Raw foods
- Seaweed
- Removing unhealthy foods, foods that promote stress (primarily caffeine), and foods that make the body more inclined to retain toxins
- Alcohol
- Caffeine
- Animal proteins (meat, eggs, and dairy)
- Added salt
- Added sugar
- Processed foods
- Drinking lots of water
- Exercising
Kelly does a wonderful job of explaining why these changes matter. She has an impressive grasp of the science behind a holistic approach, and she is able to help her clients tailor their diets to their own circumstances and goals. My wife loved the class, and she found that doing a cleanse during the most stressful times of her life counteracted her natural tendency to "treat herself" to junk foods, which just compound the stress. She's a small-business accountant, and Tax Season is the most intense time of the year for her. Ever since that first cleanse, she has made it an annual tradition to eat healthy and exercise, as best she can, from mid-February until April 15.
One aspect of the cleanse that she found especially helpful was keeping a food journal. She started with one that was pre-made, and found it helpful, but she found it wasn't quite what she wanted. I asked her what it was she was looking for, and realized it would be pretty easy to design one in Word, then print a nice, wire-bound copy via CafePress.
Note that a wire-bound book works especially well for a food journal, because you can leave it open to today's page on the kitchen counter, where you'll see it and can easily jot down notes on food, drink, exercise, etc.
Here's what I did.
How to Create and Publish a Book on CafePress
- Create a Word doc (I'm a Windows user, so that's what I describe here)
- Set the page size
- On the "Page Layout" ribbon, choose "Size", then "More Paper Sizes...", and enter the size you want
- I went with a 4.18" x 6.88" book, which is nice and small, so I chose those exact measurements as my page size in Word
- If you think you want a bigger food journal, learn more about CafePress book options
- Configure the margins
- In order to make the inner margin wider, I chose "Mirror margins" from the "Multiple pages" drop-down list
- I set the top, bottom, and outside margins to 0.4"
- For the inside margin, I went with 0.78"
- I set the gutter to 0"
- Design a one-page food journal that has the items most important to you (see a snapshot of what I came up with below)
- Add a page break
- Copy the page AND the page break, and paste it at the top of the second page, so you have two pages
- In order to create a 90-page journal, I pasted my page nine times, so I had a total of ten pages, then copied all ten pages and pasted them in eight more times
- If you want page numbers, you can easily add them via the "Page Number" item on the "Insert" ribbon
- Convert the Word doc to PDF
- I tried saving the Word doc as a PDF, but later had problems uploading the PDF to CafePress (probably because I didn't configure embedded fonts correctly?)
- To get around this problem, I printed the Word doc to PDF using CutePDF
- Be sure to set the page size when printing... Printer Properties -> Advanced -> Paper Size -> PostScript Custom Page Size
- Design front and back covers
- I used a JPG that is 1404 pixels wide and 2214 pixels tall, with a resolution of 300 pixels/inch
- Bleed of .25 inches is recommended, and critical elements of the design, such as text, should be at least half an inch from the edge
- Publish the book on CafePress
- Sign up for a CafePress account
- Open a new basic shop
- On the "Your Shops" page, click "Products"
- Click the "Add a Product" button
- Under "Office", click "Make Selections"
- In the pop-up window, choose "Book" (note that you can only have one of any given type of product in a Basic Shop, so there won't be a checkbox next to Book if you already have one... in which case I guess to have to upgrade from the Basic Shop)
- Fill in the info
- Go to Media Basket -> Document Basket and upload your PDF
- Go to Media Basket -> Image Basket and upload your front and back cover images
- Once you have all the bits and pieces put together, you should have yourself a book
- Order a copy