The RP (Renaissance Periodization) Diet is a scientifically-backed approach to nutrition designed to help individuals achieve their health and fitness goals, whether it's fat loss, muscle gain, or weight maintenance. Created by nutrition coaches Dr. Mike Israetel and Renaissance Periodization, the RP Diet emphasizes whole, unprocessed foods and proper macronutrient timing. The RP Diet Coach App is built by PhDs, IFBB Pros, Registered Dietitians, and experienced coaches to help you lose fat, build muscle, or maintain your weight with science-backed precision. This article provides a comprehensive guide to the RP Diet, with a focus on dinner examples and how to effectively utilize the RP Diet App and related resources.
Understanding the RP Diet Principles
The RP Strength diet is a nutrition plan focused on eating whole, unprocessed foods that align with your body’s needs. It emphasizes adequate protein intake and timing carb intake around workouts. The diet starts with a 2-12 week aggressive fat loss phase where you eat in a calorie deficit with timed carbs. The second phase slowly increases carbs and calories for a lean bulking period. Calorie needs are highly individual - the app calculates them for you based on factors like weight, activity level, and goals.
The RP diet is very flexible and can be followed as a lifestyle. The focus on whole foods, protein, and vegetables makes it more sustainable than restrictive plans. Customize it to fit your needs. But cutting for a long time is not recommended. RP allows carbs, especially around workouts. It’s more flexible with dairy, legumes, and whole grains than paleo.
RP Diet App: A Technological Ally
The RP Strength app makes it easy to track macros. The App offers a more user-friendly and interactive approach to the diet.
Key Features and Functionality
The RP Diet Coach App, designed by Dr. Mike Israetel, helps you plan your meals, track calories and macros, and reach your goals. The app offers AI nutrition label scanning to streamline the tracking process. If you purchase a RP Diet Coach subscription, please note billing and charges are done through your iTunes account and auto-renewed based on your subscription term. At the end of the term, unless auto-renewable subscription is disabled, your subscription will automatically renew in your iTunes account. You will be charged for the regular price of your subscription within 24 hours prior to the end of the current term.
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Device Compatibility
The RP Diet Coach app is available for a range of Apple devices:
- iPhone: Requires iOS 15.6 or later.
- iPod touch: Requires iOS 15.6 or later.
- Mac: Requires macOS 13.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.
- Apple Vision: Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
Dinner on the RP Diet: Examples and Guidelines
Dinner is a time for replenishing your body after an afternoon of activity. Following the RP Strength diet requires some meal planning and preparation, but there are many delicious recipes to choose from.
General Guidelines
- Prioritize Protein: Ensure each dinner includes a significant portion of lean protein to support muscle recovery and satiety.
- Include Vegetables: Load up on non-starchy vegetables for essential nutrients and fiber.
- Carbohydrate Timing: Adjust carbohydrate intake based on your workout schedule; consume more carbs on training days.
- Healthy Fats: Incorporate healthy fats in moderation for overall health and hormone regulation.
RP-Friendly Dinner Recipes
- Grilled Salmon with Broccoli and Quinoa: Brush the salmon with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Grill until cooked through. Steam the broccoli until tender.
- Turkey and Sweet Potato Chili: In a large pot, cook the ground turkey and onion until the turkey is browned and the onion is soft. Add the sweet potato, black beans, diced tomatoes, chili powder, and cumin. Season with salt and pepper.
Leveraging Trifecta Meal Prep
If meal prep isn't your thing or you're short on time, Trifecta offers ready-to-eat macro-friendly proteins, veggies, and carbs delivered to your home or gym. All Trifecta Meal Prep foods are RP approved. All proteins and vegetables are baked, and the carbs are steamed. Trifecta Meal Prep and Classic meals are lightly seasoned with no added oils or butters. All Trifecta proteins hit the RP requirement of 10 percent of calories from fat or lower. Meal Prep items and Classic meals come pre-measured in 4 oz portions. So you can spend less time weighing, cutting, and measuring. All Trifecta proteins are the highest quality you can get anywhere. Our proteins are always free from hormones and antibiotics. Compared to most amateur at-home meals, Trifecta proteins are more enjoyable and flavorful.
Meal Prepping Strategies for RP Success
Meal prepping your RP diet recipes on Sunday sets you up for success all week long. Traditional meal-preppers spend around 8 hours a week cooking, weighing, and portioning. That’s hundreds of hours a year and thousands in a lifetime.
Efficient Meal Prep Techniques
- Prep produce: Chop veggies and fruit, wash greens, cook potatoes and sweet potatoes.
- Freeze extras: Cooked proteins and prepared produce freeze well for future weeks.
Saving Money on the RP Diet
Meal prepping at home isn’t cheap, but buying the same food at a restaurant will cost you 3-4 times as much. The average American spends about $200-300 monthly on eating out. Some foods are much price than others. Choose wisely! Here are some charts to help you see the difference. They were created with pricing data from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Prices will likely vary region to region. If prices were not available, Amazon was used to give a reasonable estimate due to nationwide availability.
Read also: The Hoxsey Diet
- Avoid food waste: Eat all the food you’re already buying! The average American throws away a whopping $1,300 worth of food every year.
- Eat the right amount of food: Remember, most food (especially meat and veggies!) weighs different amounts depending on whether it’s raw or cooked.
- Clean out the pantry and freezer: You probably already have half-eaten bags of rice, oats, grits and three kinds of pasta (not to mention tons of cans of beans!) hanging out in your pantry.
- Buy in-season fruit: Fruit can be part of a healthy and nutritious diet, but it is also one of the more expensive carb sources.
- Eat frozen veggies: Frozen veggies can be a cheap way to maximize your carbs, and nutritionally they are the same as fresh veggies.
- Shop at cheaper stores: Places like Costco, Walmart, and ALDI are cheaper than upper-scale grocery stores like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.
- Don’t be afraid of buying generic.
- Check the unit price for food.
- Buy in bulk: Buying in bulk is one of the easiest ways to save money on groceries. Stores like Costco and Sam’s can be great for buying the food you need in bulk to get you a discount.
- Meal plan based on what’s on sale: Most people plan their meals before they get to the store and then hope to get lucky by finding a store sale or a couple of good coupons.
Addressing Common Challenges
Macro Tracking and Food Weight
Remember, the numbers on your template are the grams of each macro in the food, not the weight of the food itself. For instance, 4 oz. of sweet potatoes have 22 grams of carbs. Now multiply by 2/3 to find the amount of Trifecta-cooked sweet potatoes to eat. You need 3 oz. It works the same way for proteins. For instance, 4oz of chicken has 25g of protein. In the example above, you need 6.4 ounces of uncooked protein. Now multiply by 2/3 to see how much cooked Trifecta chicken to eat. You need 4.3 oz. Still, feeling confused? Don't worry, we've taken out almost all of the math with our RP Template Macro Calculator.
Simplified RP Diet Templates
Our Original RP Diet Templates brought the science of progressive dieting to hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. They are currently in their third generation, having been optimized based on the latest findings in sport nutrition and user feedback, and are more effective than ever. It's hard to beat a product that's so well proven, so that's not what the Simplified RP Diet Templates were designed to do. Our intent in developing these simpler, less rigorous templates, was to bring the effectiveness of the originals to more of you. To do that, we created a product that gets you results comparable to those of the original templates, but does so simpler. Fewer meals, simpler foods, and only the most basic measurement instructions with zero need for math of any kind.
Do the Simplified RP Diet Templates guarantee the same level of athletic performance as the Original (Fat Loss) Diet Templates? No. If athletic performance is your priority, the originals will continue to be your best bet.
- Different Meal Number: The fat loss diet templates all have 6 total meals per day, including a workout shake. The simplified templates have only 3 main meals per day, no workout shake, and an optional snack.
- Optional Snack: To help improve diet adherence, the simplified templates have an optional snack, worth a "x" hundred calories per day of literally anything you want to eat.
- Meals Don't Vary Based on Workouts: …if you do any at all.
- Fewer Diet Phases: The original fat loss diet templates have 3 total calorie-reduction phases; Fat Loss 1,2 and 3, while the simplified templates only have two phases: Weight Loss 1 and 2, making them less precise but easier to get through.
- Simplified Measuring: The fat loss templates specify the number of grams of proteins, carbs, and fats to eat in every main food group for each meal. This gives them precision but requires some math to ensure desired food quantities.
- Portion Guide Visualizations: Relatedly, the simplified templates also feature a diagram for each diet phase that shows the relative amount of food from each food group alotted during that phase. This scaled portion picture gives you an at-a-glance reference to keep you on track without weighing or measuring.
- Altered Macros: The fat loss templates have the kinds of combinations of proteins, carbs, and fats that are tailored to athletes, allowing for fat loss while continuing to optimize for sport performance.
Additional RP Diet Tips
- Utilize the RP Strength app: The app makes tracking calories, macros, and timing nutrition effortless.
- Learn proper portion sizes: Get familiar with appropriate serving sizes for proteins, carbs, and fats.
- Drink plenty of water: Hydration is key for appetite control, digestion, workout recovery, and health on this high protein diet.
- Get enough sleep: Sleep is critical for energy levels, hunger hormones, muscle recovery, and performance.
- Manage stress: Find healthy stress relief like exercise, meditation, yoga, or talking to a friend.
- Make it a lifestyle: The RP diet teaches principles for lifelong healthy eating.
- Don’t eat out.
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