RP Diet Coach

I’ve been using RP for a month or so now and it is pretty irritating to use. You have to enter everything all the time and a lot of scan in items aren’t available yet. There really isn't much “learning” the app does to help you or guide you. Just weekly “go up or down in nutrients”. Switching to Noom.

It is cumbersome, non intuitive and suggests wildly processed food when I try to input fruits. They do take precautions and pay attention to disordered eating. For many, the adjustments from body weight feedback will be very worthwhile. The TDEE is determined via Mifflin, which is fine, but using other people’s science, posting it along transformation pics, and offering no other education around a clumsy platform and passing it off as innovative is dubious at best.

Impossible to understand

It does the hard thinking for you. If you want to improve your health, this is a great app for it.

Couldn’t be easier to flexible diet! Love this app

So I started out this app as new to nutrition, and two years into recreational powerlifting/strength training. I was so excited to get started, and let me say that I achieved the weight loss results I was after... and then some. I have a very physically demanding job - I work full time in a kitchen so I am on my feet and moving around a minimum of 8 hours a day. The starting macros were good: 160 g of protein, 55g of fat, and 210 g of carbs. I could tolerate the decreases in macros just fine. I hit my 15lbs weight loss goal early- about 45 days into my diet. And I was barely making it through a workout. At this point I was eating 45g of carbs on a workout day, heavily active, and my protein had been cut to 150g (the updated rp app claims that it doesn’t take macros away from protein, which I found to be untrue). I hit this goal right before thanksgiving, and because I still had time on the diet, I decided to enjoy thanksgiving and ate lots of carbs etc. This coincided with an ovulation cycle and so I “gained” over 6lbs in what I recognized to be water weight. The app read it as fat gain and recommended o reduce nutrients. Because I am new to this nutrition game, and a perfectionist, I went with the app’s recommendations. The result? A cut to 50g of fat, and 20g of carbs PER DAY. On a WORKOUT DAY. As a HEAVILY ACTIVE individual!!!!!!! I went with it, and had just enough energy to drive home after work and crash. This was what the app called “macros increased to a safe minimum”. I couldn’t even workout, or go for a walk. It was ridiculous, contradicts the ethos of eating to stay active and lift, not to mention probably unsafe. At this point I had hired a new coach who also gave nutritional advice, and he couldn’t believe what I was telling him ( esp since he had used RP before and liked it) and immediately told me to increase my macros to 175g of protein, 70g of fat, and 210 g of carbs. I’m so glad he did. It brought me back to life. This app is FAR from perfect, and I highly advise anyone who uses it to keep a knowledgeable nutritionist at hand for these kinds of situations. Moreover, this app is clearly lacking in flexibility when it comes to female users. There are plenty of period tracking apps out there, and it would make sense for the RP app to either sync that info for female users, or have their own period tracking feature for female users, in order to better read weigh-ins for possible water weight retentions (especially if you have a 95% meal accuracy macro level check in). This is especially pertinent since women need more calories right before and during their periods, than at other timings during their cycles. The app reads these weight fluctuations as fat gain and recommends cutting calories instead, which can be frustrating for a newbie like myself who would rather trust the app (which hypes itself as being scientific and the best thing since sliced bread) than myself. And another thing: their website calls women’s menstruation cycles a “problem”; not to be some overly sensitive feminist on the internet but seriously? Nothing about the human body should be seen as a “problem”. This intersects with science and medicine historically viewing women’s bodies as problematic. Maybe the problem is a poorly designed app. I wanted to do a celebratory ig post about how great RP is, but, for obvious reasons, chose not to. I was also less than thrilled with customer service; anytime I had an issue, they told me to “end the diet” if I found it “too hard”, instead of choosing to address the ways in which their algorithms could be faulty. I am now on the “maintenance phase” post diet, and again, the macros make no sense: 150g protein, 45g fat, 230g carbs. I am 174lbs now and my macros should reflect that. The only reason I find RP helpful now is because the app itself makes it easy to find the correct measurements for food. But tbh I can probably find another app that does that for free. The one perk is that the app really helped me familiarize myself with meal timing consistency and portions/weighing food out properly. If you want to lose weight, I do recommend you run a maintenance phase first, or choose a small weight loss goal (5-10 lbs) in order to build these habits without entering 20g carb danger territory. Don’t take the app recommendations verbatim: if you feel hungry while on it at 45g of carbs it won’t hurt you to actually eat. I had quite a few “cheat meals” (aka a big bowl of lentils a few night bc I just could NOT do the 15g -75g carbs) and I still lost more weight than the goal which was 15lbs. (According to the app, losing weight too fast is dangerous, but it never adjusted itself for me to eat more when I did lose weight too fast. It only adjusted when I “gained”). The app most likely works because it recommends you less food than you need. Maybe the creators of the app think overweight people will eat too much despite weighing their food out? Idk. I will never understand the logic of recommending 15/20g of carbs in a day. So proceed at your own risk, and with caution, logic, and some snacks in your pocket.

It was a test run. I want to start my diet plan on 1/2/2021. The app didn’t give me the option to chose when to start. See you in 10 days

If you took a new person to dieting, they almost would certainly not do well on this app. And the app itself needs UI testing from people not familiar with it. Otherwise it’s a fantastic app that does a service, not well covered by other dieting apps, in the most scientifically backed ways possible.

I’ve been so scared to eat more even though deep down I knew that’s what my body needed! RP helped me have trust in the process and I was able to maintain on super high calories! Everyone was shocked when I would tell them how much I was eating while staying so lean! I will definitely count on it for all my diet needs!

too difficult to use