RP Diet App Review (My Honest Opinion After 9+ Weeks)

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I greatly respect the team at Renaissance Periodization (RP) and love the content they produce. 

However, having just attempted a fat loss diet with the RP Diet App for the past 9 weeks and struggling with it the entire time, I can’t say I would recommend it to most people.

The RP diet app is very rigid and doesn’t allow much room for flexibility. You have to eat a specific amount of protein, carbs, and fats at each meal instead of aiming for overall daily calorie and macro targets.

This can make nutrition tracking unnecessarily complicated and confusing for many people.

With that said, my experience is only my experience. So, I encourage you to try the app for yourself (you can do so for 14 days free using this link). Many people seem to love it and get great results. More on this below.

Key Takeaways

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• The RP Diet app is a macro tracking app. It does not track calories or other nutritional information like micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) or water intake.

• The app focuses on nutrient timing, meaning it sets your macros based on when you work out so that you have enough fuel for energy and recovery. This makes it beneficial for athletes who want to optimize their performance.

• Meal prepping is essential when following the app because it works best when you keep your meals simple and eat the same foods regularly.

• There are features within the app that make meal prepping and logging your meals easier, such as the ability to create shopping lists.

• If you’re looking for an app that tracks both calories and macros, and adjusts your targets based on your progress, try MacroFactor (click to read my review).

An Important Note About The RP Diet App

Before diving into my full review of the RP diet app, it’s important to recognize that my experience is NOT your experience. 

As you’ll see below, I wasn’t a fan of the app.

However, many people I’ve spoken with love it and have found great success.  

So just because the RP diet app didn’t work for me, doesn’t mean it won’t work for you.  

I recommend that you check the app out for yourself to make your own assessment.  

After publishing this article, I contacted RP about my experience and said that I was going to publish a slightly negative review of the app. 

They appreciated hearing about my experience and said that if anyone wanted to try the app, they would be happy to provide both a 14-day free trial and a discount.  

So, it’s up to you.  

If you want to check out the RP Diet App, use this link. It will give you 33% off your monthly subscription for the first 6 months. You also get 14 days free when signing up.

Renaissance Periodization: Company and App Overview

Renaissance Periodization was founded by Nick Shaw, a competitive powerlifter and bodybuilder, and Dr. Mike Israetel, a competitive powerlifter and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu athlete.

Today, the RP team is comprised of 25+ registered dieticians and individuals with master’s degrees and Ph.D.’s in disciplines such as nutritional sciences and sports performance.

RP’s mission is to deliver: 

“The most effective, scientifically sound and reliable diet and training consultation to anyone who wants to use it to achieve results.” 

It follows a multi-tiered, science-backed approach to nutrition that includes a combination of overall calorie balance, macronutrients (protein, fats, and carbs), nutrient timing, and food composition. 

After offering diet templates in Excel and PDF format for years, Shaw and the RP team began the development of the RP diet app in 2016. 

They launched it a couple of years later, and while the templates are still available, the mobile app is now the preferred choice for most people who are new to RP.

RP Diet App: How It Works

Before getting into how the RP diet app works, there is one very important thing you should know about it: it is NOT a calorie tracker. It acts as a coaching tool that tells you when and how much to eat at each meal based on when you work out, but you won’t see how many calories you’re eating every day.

Furthermore, the app doesn’t count all macros from all foods. 

For example, if you’re logging sprouted bread as your carb source, it won’t count any protein that the bread may contain.

This is primarily so you can get as much protein as possible from whole protein sources (i.e., chicken breast) and is also why the app doesn’t function as a calorie tracker. 

Many people get confused by this in the beginning, but if you’re aware of it from the start, it allows you to better understand how the app works.

Setting Up the App

When you first sign up, you’ll be asked to fill in stats like your height, weight, how many average steps you get per day, what days you workout, how difficult your workouts are, how many meals you want to eat per day, and how many hours of sleep you get each night.

It’s important that you’re honest when inputting all this information because it will take you longer to reach your goals if you lie about how active you are or how often you work out.

You’ll also have to choose whether you want to lose fat, build muscle, ormaintain your weight.

Your diet will typically start the following day unless you specified a different start date during the sign-up process.

Logging Meals

Logging meals in the RP app is unlike logging food in most other meal tracking apps. Rather than logging food as you eat it at whatever time of day you eat it, you eat at very specific times of the day when following the app.

Also, instead of logging the exact amount of food after you already ate it, the RP app works best when you log food before you eat it.

This is because you have to use a slider that tells you how much of a protein, carb, and fat source you can consume at that particular meal.

• Check Out: 10 RP Diet Recipes (Nutrition Coach Approved)

You can choose foods from the recommended food lists within the app, add custom food entries, or log menu items from popular chain restaurants.

There’s also a barcode scanner, but I I only recommend using it if something is nowhere to be found on any of the food lists in the app (for example, you can’t find a particular brand of breakfast cereal in the app). 

This is one of the only times where the app will count all macros from a specific food, so you can potentially shortchange yourself on more protein, fats, or carbs if you use the barcode scanner for everything.

The nature of how logging meals in the RP app works requires a lot of prep time because it encourages you to eat meals with whole food sources and stick with the same food items for most of your meals.

It doesn’t work well if you frequently eat meals on the go, eat a lot of packaged foods, or don’t like eating the same thing every day.

It’s also frustrating to use if you like eating snacks during the day because nearly every meal requires you to eat a protein, carb, and fat source.

Say you want to snack on nuts and fruit in between your first and second meals, for example. You have to log the macros the nuts and fruit for one of those meals so they are accounted for, even if you don’t eat them with that meal.

Here is a quick screen recording of how the app’s functionality looks in action:

Checking In Meals

The RP app requires you to check in every meal to indicate whether you were at, under, or over your macros. This is so you can track how consistent you are with your diet. 

The app doesn’t do anything with this information except show you an adherence score. It’s motivating and encouraging to see green on your adherence score if you’re doing well (90% or above) with your diet.

But if you fall below that and start seeing orange or red, it can be discouraging and make it harder to stick to your diet.

Weighing In and Weekly Check-Ins

Weigh-ins are always on Fridays. RP does this so you have the weekend to go food shopping and do your meal prep based on new macros, which the app will adjust based on how you’re progressing towards your goal.

The app will calculate your average weight from the previous week to determine your rate of weight loss or gain. If you’re on track to hit your goal, it will recommend that you keep your macros the same.

If you’re losing weight too quickly or not gaining weight fast enough, the app will recommend increasing your macros.

If your progress has stalled, the app will recommend decreasing your macros. You can choose how aggressive of a change you want the app to make or opt to repeat the previous week.

Being able to repeat the previous week is nice if, say, you’re a female who’s just had your period and you know that it threw off your weight for a few days.

You may also wish to select this option if you weren’t perfect with your meals or know of another definitive reason why your weight didn’t go down that week.

Otherwise, you should follow the app’s recommendations to decrease your macros so you can reach your goals within your desired time frame.

Related: Best Nutrition Apps For Weight Gain: Find out where RP diet app ranks on this list.

Rating Your Workouts

The RP diet app determines your macros based on your overall activity levels and how difficult your workouts are. It also caters to people who lift weights.

When you add your workouts to your schedule in the app, you’ll have to indicate whether they are light, moderate, or hard. Here are the guidelines RP recommends for rating your workouts:

However, RP doesn’t count cardio sessions under an hour as workouts. There are some exceptions to this, like if you’re training for a 5k. RP considers that peformance cardio since you’re likely training harder than you would if you were running just for fun.

But for the most part, days on which you only do cardio would count as non-training days.

What I Liked About Using The RP Diet App

1. Create Meal Combinations for Frequent Meals

One of the things I like most about the RP diet app is the ability to create meal combinations for meals that you eat frequently.

If you eat chicken thighs, brown rice, almonds, and broccoli for one of your meals every day, you can save that combination so you don’t have to keep adding individual entries each day. 

This saves a lot of time and helps make the app feel a bit less tedious to use.

2. Copy Meals From One Day to the Next

Another thing I like about the app is that you can copy meals from one day to the next, which is another great time-saving feature.

You can choose to copy all meals from one day to another or choose individual meals to copy over. 

You can also select which time frame to copy certain meals to. 

If you ate a certain meal yesterday at 10am and want to eat it for your 2pm meal the next day, you can copy it to that 2pm meal slot.

The only thing you’ll have to be aware of when doing this is that your macros may not be the same for meals at different times of the day. 

The app will automatically adjust how much of each food you can eat, but you’ll need to be mindful of that for meal prep purposes.

3. Switch Between Raw and Cooked Weights

You can toggle between the raw and cooked weights for certain food items. This is my favorite feature of the app. It enables you to get accurate food measurements without having to manually calculate the equivalents of raw vs cooked food weights.

One of the most common questions for diet tracking (whether it’s through the RP diet app or another app) is whether you should measure your food raw or cooked. This is important because most nutrition labels are based on the weight of uncooked food.

If your package of chicken breast says that it has 110 calories in a 4oz serving, it most likely is referring to 4oz of raw chicken.

If you measure 4oz of chicken after you cook it, you’ll be consuming more calories than you intended to since it loses some moisture in the cooking process.

4. Add Foods to a Shopping List

The shopping list feature in the RP diet app is an excellent way to see how much food you have to buy for the week.

Let’s say you like to get your food shopping done on Sundays. You can sit down on Sunday morning and plan out your meals for the week, then go to the shopping list feature to figure out how much food you’ll need to buy. 

This will save you from having to do a bunch of mental math in the middle of the food store. 

It will also prevent you from having to do more food shopping in the middle of the week because you ran out of food or have leftovers that you won’t be able to eat because the food went bad.

• Related Article: MyMacros+ App Review

5. Focus on Macro Breakdowns and Nutrient Timing to Fuel Your Performance

The main reason why RP is so strict about eating specific macros at each meal is that it’s designed to help you fuel your performance in the gym.

As such, you’ll notice that most of your carbs are to be eaten before and after your workouts while most of your fats are to be eaten further away from your workouts.

This approach is quite common amongst active individuals, but it can be difficult to stick to these guidelines if you’re just aiming for overall calorie/macro targets every day. 

The RP diet is beneficial in that regard because it will ensure that you’re eating an optimal amount of food around your workouts.

The macros that are recommended to you in the RP diet app are also based on scientific recommendations for hypertrophy goals, which is important for bodybuilders or anyone who wants to drastically change their physique.

6. Tells You When to Adjust Your Macros

The RP diet app is like a mini virtual coach that tells you when you need to adjust your macros and by how much.

When you’re tracking macros/calories on your own, you may be hesitant to make adjustments even if your progress stalls. It can also be difficult to figure out how big of a decrease you need to make and which specific macro the decrease should come from.

The RP app takes the guesswork out of this by recommending diet adjustments based on your weigh-ins. You’re not left wondering whether you should drop carbs or fats (or both) and when you should make those changes.

What I Did NOT Like About RP Diet App

Despite all of those positives, the four cons below prevent me from using the app long-term.  

1. Very Rigid

The app is very rigid. Instead of giving you a calorie target to reach each day with an overall breakdown of protein, fats, and carbs, you have a specific amount of food to eat within each meal depending on when you work out.

If you try to go even just a tiny bit over your macros for any meal, the app won’t let you log it at all.

In actuality, there is some flexibility to go over 5g of any macro. When you check in your meals, you can select the “roughly at macros” option if you ate within 5g of each macro.

You could theoretically add a tiny bit more food to your meals. You just can’t note that extra food in the app, which can be frustrating if you like being precise with your tracking.

There’s also no flexibility at all with adjusting macros. 

If you wanted to eat more fats and take away some carbs from a meal, you can’t. 

However, you can shift macros from one meal to another. If you know you will be eating a large dinner, for example, you can take some fat and carbs from earlier meals and move them an evening meal.

While this does give you some room to adjust the size of your meals, it still doesn’t resolve the issue of not being able to adjust your overall daily macros at all.

2. No Overall Calorie Count

A huge drawback of the RP diet app is that you don’t see an overall daily calorie count. 

RP uses this as a selling point, but I think it just creates confusion. If you know anything about nutrition (and sometimes even if you don’t), not knowing how many calories you’re eating each day can lead to more questions than answers.

If you recall from my explanation of how the app works, it doesn’t count the macros for every single food item you log.

This is why the app doesn’t show total calories, but it makes things too complicated, especially if you want to see how all of a food’s macros factor into your day.

I also find this to be a bit of a paradox on RP’s part. 

When I used to follow the company closely on social media years ago, I remember seeing a pyramid that it had created showing that calorie balance is the second most important part of dieting after consistency.

Considering that, it surprises me that the products it creates don’t actually give you an accurate idea of how many calories you’re eating every day.

3. Less Food on Rest Days

Another thing I don’t like about the app (which was also an issue I had when I followed the templates) is that it makes you eat fewer calories on rest days. 

In theory, this sounds logical – if you’re not working out, you’re not burning as many calories, so you shouldn’t need to eat as much. But I don’t think this approach works for everyone, myself included.

For example, Wednesdays are usually my rest days, and Thursdays are my deadlift days. I work out in the morning within about 45 minutes of waking up.

The app would like me to eat before I work out, but training on a full stomach makes me feel sick, so I don’t eat a meal beforehand.

If I eat a decent amount of food on Wednesdays, I can get through tough deadlift workouts on Thursdays with just a few sips of coffee and about half of a protein shake in my system. 

But if I eat fewer calories than usual on Wednesday, my Thursday morning workouts suffer because I have less food in my system from the day before.

This also makes it more difficult for meal prep purposes since you’ll have to account for different macros on different days. 

It’s more time-consuming to measure out a bunch of meals with different macros instead of having consistent targets to reach every day.

4. Drastic Macro Reductions

My least favorite thing about the app is how drastically it reduces your macros if your weight plateaus. 

You could go from eating 200g of carbs to 50g (or less) per day, which I think is way too drastic of a decrease all at one time for the vast majority of people.

You could get around this by not setting your goal too aggressively to begin with. 

You do also have the option of keeping your macros the same from week to week if you want to give your body more time to get used to a specific set of macros.

But if you blindly follow the app’s suggestions, you could potentially be in a significant deficit for 10+ weeks because it doesn’t offer a gradual reduction in macros.

How the RP Diet App Compares to the Diet Templates

As I’ve mentioned, RP also sells diet templates in addition to the mobile app. 

My first ever experience with RP was back when the templates were still in Excel (they’re now in PDF format), and I had good results with mine. 

Through two cutting phaes on the templates, I had lost about 15lbs and 9 inches from my chest, waist, and hips.

I was a lot lighter when I last used the templates than I am now having just used the app. 

I can’t speak to whether or not the macro breakdowns are much different since my template macros and app macros are based on two different body weights. 

But I have a solid understanding of the overall differences between the two.

There are three main ways that the app differs from the templates:

1. Moving Through Specific Diet Phases

With the templates, you move through different diet phases: base, fat loss 1, fat loss 2, and fat loss 3.

Base is the first phase and is meant to be a sort of introductory phase. RP recommended sticking with the base for at least two weeks to get you accustomed to the diet.

You’d have to either keep track of your weight manually or use a mobile app so you could know what your average weight is each week. 

That average would determine whether or not you could stay on the current phase or if you have to move to the next one and decrease your macros.

There is an element of moving through phases in the app, but it’s not explicitly stated that you’re going from base to fat loss 1, fat loss 1 to fat loss 2, and so on.

2. Less Drastic Macro Decreases

On the templates, the macro decreases between fat loss phases are much more reasonable. For example, they may decrease your carbs by 10g per meal instead of slashing them by 150g all at once.

Fats are also cut gradually, and with my templates, they were reduced by about 1 serving at each meal until the very end, when I only had 2-3 full servings of fats per day.

Each fat loss template also comes with maintenance templates that you reverse through after your fat loss period ends. 

You work through them until your weight stabilized and you were no longer losing weight. 

The changes were gradual to prevent an excessive amount of weight gain following your cut.

3. Counting All Macros

The last major difference between the app and the templates is counting vs not counting all macros in certain foods. With the templates, you receive a list of acceptable food items and at each meal, you choose a food for each macro.

The “incidental” macros aren’t factored in. 

So if you want to use peanut butter as your fat, you don’t have to account for the carbs in a serving of peanut butter. With the app, you do have to count those carbs.

The only exception to this is if you want to eat something that’s not included on the food list, in which case you’d have to count all macros whether you’re using the app or templates. 

However, with the templates, you only have to count all macros for a non-template food item if it has more than a couple of grams of a certain macro.

Is The RP App or Templates Better?

I may be biased since I had such good success with the RP diet templates and not a lot of luck with the mobile app, but I’d recommend the templates over the app in most cases. 

While you still have to hold yourself accountable for being wise with your food choices, the templates will be more forgiving if you want some flexibility with your diet.

For me, the templates were easier to stick to because if I ate an off-template meal, I was able to enjoy it and then move on and get back on plan for my next meal. 

With the app, you have to check in all of your meals, and there can be a certain amount of guilt associated with telling it that you went over your macros.

As well, if your meal adherence in the app starts to get too low, it can get discouraging to keep seeing red or orange numbers even if you’re trying your best to get back on track.

If you are interested in trying the RP diet and don’t mind going the old-school route and using printed templates, you may want to give those a try. 

They are still focused on nutrient timing and eating a certain amount of macros per meal, but the overall process is less tedious since you won’t have to worry about multiple daily meal check-ins.

Who Should and Should Not Use the RP Diet App?

Who is the RP Diet App For?

• People who have been counting macros and tracking their weight for at least 3 months. The app is best for those who are already familiar with macro tracking and understand how different foods, workouts, your menstrual cycle (if you’re a female), and other factors affect your weight. This will help you feel more confident when accepting or rejecting the app’s macro adjustment recommendations if your progress stalls.

• Competitive athletes who want to use nutrition to enhance their performance. RP’s focus on nutrient timing can be especially beneficial for competitive athletes. It will tell you exactly how much to eat before and after your workouts so you can perform and recover well.

• Bodybuilders or anyone who wants to make their physique a priority. In addition to nutrient timing to help fuel your athletic performance, the app is also designed to provide macro recommendations that can best help you achieve your body composition goals.

Who is the RP Diet App NOT For?

• Anyone who’s never tracked calories or macros before. If you have never kept a log of everything that you eat in a day, the RP diet app is not a good place to start. I’d recommend starting with MacroFactor, which offers a more straightforward method of tracking your meals.

• People with busy or unpredictable schedules. The RP diet app requires you to eat every 3-4 hours, which can be hard for some people to adhere to. As well, if your schedule changes every day and you work out at different times, meal prep can be difficult since your macro targets and meal times would likely change from day to day.

• Anyone who has a history of disordered eating. Having very specific macros to hit at each meal and eat at specific times throughout the day can make you obsessive with food. Someone who has a poor relationship with food should either choose a less restrictive app or consider not tracking calories or macros at all until those issues are resolved.

• People who want an app that tells them how many calories they eat in a day. Other meal planning apps can provide a more holistic view of your daily nutrition.

• People who don’t strength train. The RP diet app is centered around fueling performance for strength training workouts and doesn’t count most cardio workouts as training. If you primarily do cardio and your workouts are less than an hour, you won’t get much benefit out of using the app.

RP Diet App Alternatives

I’ve tested 18+ nutrition apps (click to check out the full list). Based on my experience, here are some top 2 alternatives:

1. MacroFactor

MacroFactor is similar to the RP Diet app in that it also acts as a virtual coach that adjusts your diet each week based on how you’re progressing towards your goal.

However, MacroFactor also tracks calories, so you can see exactly how much you’re supposed to eat each day. It also doesn’t lock you into eating at specific times. You can spread your macros per meal throughout the day however you want and eat at times that are convenient for you.

Use the link below and enter the code FEASTGOOD when signing up to get an extra week on your free trial (2 weeks total). Your credit card won’t be charged if you cancel before the trial period ends.

2. Noom

While RP focuses only on macro tracking, Noom focuses only on calorie tracking. However, Noom is an excellent calorie tracker for weight loss because it teaches you how to make a diet sustainable for the long term and fit healthy eating into your overall lifestyle.

I also like that no foods are off-limits with Noom. It categorizes foods into colors (green, yellow, or orange) based on how nutritious or calorically-dense they are. However, it doesn’t consider any foods truly “bad.” This helps show you that you don’t have to completely remove your favorite foods from your diet, even when you want to lose weight.

Use the link below to try Noom for 14 days for just $1.

RP Diet Comparisons

• RP Diet vs Avatar Nutrition
• RP Diet vs MyFitnessPal
• RP Diet vs. Noom
• MacroFactor vs RP Diet

Frequently Asked Questions

How Much Does the Rp Diet App Cost?

The RP diet app costs $14.99 per month ($179.88 per year, billed monthly) for a monthly subscription or about $12.50 per month ($149.99 per year, billed annually) for a yearly subscription.

A free 14-day trial is available for new users. You can also search social media for discount codes from sponsored athletes.

Is There a Free Version of the Rp Diet App?

Outside of the 14-day free trial for new users, there is no free version of the RP diet app. 

How Do You Change Your Goal on the Rp Diet App?

You can choose one of three goals at a time in the RP diet app: fat loss, muscle gain, or maintenance. To change your goal, you have to end your current diet and set up a new one.

You can do this by opening the app and going to More > End Current Diet and following the on-screen instructions.

How Do You Cancel the Rp Diet App?

To cancel the RP diet app, open the app and go to More > Settings > Subscriptions. You’ll then be directed to a link to cancel your subscription in the Google Play Store (for Android devices) or the App Store (for iOS devices).

Can You See Calories on RP Diet App?

You cannot see calories on the RP Diet app. You can only see how much protein, carbs, and fats you eat per day and per meal. 

Does RP Diet App Count Net Carbs? 

The RP Diet app counts net carbs (total carbohydrates minus fiber). It also counts carbs from sugar alcohols even though many food manufacturers don’t include them on their nutrition labels.

This is because many sugar alcohols do contain calories, so those have to be accounted for in your macro recommendations. 

Can You Snack On RP Diet App? 

The RP Diet app does not have snacks, per se. Every meal needs to have a protein, fat, and carb source. If you snack in between your meals, you need to account for those macros in one of your meals in the app.

This way, you’re not accidentally overeating, which can hinder your progress if you want to lose weight.

Can You Intermittent Fast on RP Diet App? 

You can intermittent fast on the RP diet app. It focuses heavily on nutrient timing so that you can fuel and recover from your workouts, but you can set busy periods for times when you know you can’t eat.

If you intermittent fast, you can adjust those periods so that your meals fall within your desired eating window.

Why Is the Protein so High on the Rp Diet?

Protein is high on the RP diet because it helps with satiety and is necessary for recovery in people who train at a high intensity.

It’s especially important if you’re on a fat loss or muscle-building diet because it helps prevent a significant loss of muscle mass and aids in muscle growth.

What If I Eat Less in a Meal on the Rp Diet?

The RP diet enables you to eat to within 5g of each macro for your meals. If you were significantly under that, you would select “under macros” when you complete that meal’s check-in.

It’s also best to make up those macros at other meals later that day to keep yourself nourished.

How Do You Substitute Food in the Rp Diet App?

You can’t really substitute foods in the RP diet app. You do have the option to scan the barcode for food items not on the list. You also don’t have to input food if you want to eat something that’s not on the list.

You’ll just have to read the nutrition labels to make sure you’re staying within your macro targets.

What to Do If You Miss a Meal on the Rp Diet?

If you’re using the RP app and miss a meal, you’ll have to indicate that you were under your macros when you check in that meal.

You should also do your best to make them up at your next meal to ensure you’re still consuming an adequate amount of food.