Nine Weeks of Cutting Weight Using the RP Diet App

Hi! This is Jessica Danger, your Managing Editor. Over the next nine weeks I will be using the RP Diet App to cut weight. I’ve set my goal for nine pounds, that’s dropping one pound a week, and brings us to the end of summer. (I know. Not fair.)

Each week, I’ll update this page on how my nine weeks is going with progress reports, weigh-ins, exercise notes and other observations throughout the week. If you’ve got a question you’d like to ask during my journey just shoot me a note and I’ll answer one each week. 

Full disclosure: I am already familiar with RP as a diet. I used their templates a few years ago and had great success with them. So when I heard that they had an app out, I was excited to see what the app was all about. 

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Overview

The RP Diet app lets you choose your goals; you can cut weight, mass weight or maintain weight. After you choose your goal and set a number, the app asks you a series of questions about your lifestyle what time you get up and what time you go to bed, how many times a day you train and at what level of exertion. This is important as it tells you when to eat and exactly how much based on your activity level that day.

Each day, you build your meals from a drop down list of RP approved foods. The app tells you exactly how much of that food to eat to hit your target macros for that meal. It literally does the math for you. Easy day. 

Then, it does this glorious thing where it reminds you when to eat. Supposedly, each week the app infers and adapts just to you and your metabolism, making necessary weekly adjustments to your diet to keep you headed  towards your goals.

So, here we go. Week one starts today. 

Week 9: September 2-8

Starting Weight: 160

Ending Weight: 158.4 (still on track)

Exercise: I took a rest day this week, Saturday. I am still marking my training as moderate.

Meal Adherence: 77.5%

How I feel overall: Light, lean, and hungry. I feel slower in my WODs and sometimes dizzy. I’ve started to add BCAA’s in my workout shake, then following up with electrolytes, which is helpful. I get 30 — 35 grams of carbs a day, which is not a lot. But I PR’d my Glen time and my deadlift this week and still did well during class WODs, so I don’t know that it’s actually negatively affecting anything, despite not feeling fantastic. Also, several people commented that I am looking lean, so it seems to be working.

Points to note: This week was difficult for no other reason than my birthday. I stayed on track for the better part of the week, but I actively decided to allow myself to celebrate twice: once with my best friend and once with my kids. Those two meals, for me right now, bare more weight than my actual weight. But this does bring up a valid point: cutting for performance is hard. You need to be prepared. Know what you want and know what you are willing to do to get there. Be prepared to make sacrifices to get there if you need to.

Question of the week: A reader wrote in, which you can do too, with this: Can you substitute foods not in the drop down list and how do you incorporate recipes to hit macros?

This is a great question. You can swap out “substitute foods” on RP. There have been times when I have substituted things from the drop-down menu to make them fit. I had some leftover Daily Harvest smoothies in my freezer that first week and so I just used similar items in the drop down menu to meet the macros on the app. So, I chose banana as my carb, pea protein as my protein and almonds as my fat because those were the ingredients listed in the smoothie. Then, I just did the math based on the nutritional value to see how much I could actually eat without going over my macros. Same with eating out; try to order simply and do your best to estimate the size and ingredients to plug into the app.

Week 1: July 8 – 14

Starting Weight: 161.2

Ending Weight: 160 (we’re on track!)

Exercise: I took no rest days this week. I marked each of my training days as moderate. I felt well fueled for each of my training sessions.

Meal Adherence: It took me all week to build to a 73.81% meal adherence and let me tell you, this is hard-earned. Even for someone who is very familiar with tracking food, I hovered in the 60% for days. It took some serious macro magic to get that percentage up.

How I feel overall: Hungry. I’ve spent the last year intuitively eating, so cutting for performance is a pivot for me. But aside from adjusting my food intake, really I feel great. Not having any carbs during training is also different, but it wound up being less of an issue than I anticipated. Last week we were on the road for a handful of days and staying on track with my eating times proved challenging, so I did the best I could and we still came out on top weight loss wise. Our goal is to drop one pound a week and we did that and then some.

Points to note: I love that the app reminds me when it’s time to eat. Also, the app is almost foolproof. I say this as someone who is significantly math-challenged. You choose the food you want to eat for that meal and it tells you exactly how much to eat. Just follow the directions. The app suggested I further reduce my caloric intake for this coming week to stay on track. So, as of this morning, my weekly intact will have dropped.

Question of the week: Someone wrote in asking how precise the food measurements need to be. This is an easy answer: Very. I recommend getting a food scale and following the suggestions that the RP Diet App gives you for weight. You need to weigh everything. I weigh everything out the night and pack my meals for the next day before so I don’t have to fuss with it in the morning. My meals are already weighed and marked when the App reminds me to eat.