With the growing power of the RP Diet App, it’s easy to get carried away into making a complicated diet. That’s not a bad thing by itself. For people with complex and changing schedules and for people that want to get their food through a large variety of scanned and store-bought items, the expansive power of the app can be a lifesaver. But for a lot of the rest of us, it can be a bit overwhelming. All of these choices can seem like too much, and before you know it, your simple diet experience can be anything but.
The great news is that your RP Diet App experience can be super simple and doesn’t have to be the least bit complicated! Here are 6 easy tips to keep your diet journey on the straight and narrow:
- Select most of your foods from “The Basics” category. These are the simpler, whole foods that can be prepared with no fancy accounting or fuss. You can definitely enter in food from the expanded list or scan barcodes, but then your diet will be that much more complex. Sticking to mostly the basics keeps your diet simpler.
- Choose just a few of the basics each week. Choose 2-4 lean proteins, healthy fats, veggies, and fruits or grains. Combine them in tasty but simple ways to generate all your meals for the week. This means your cooking can get much simpler, and you can save the fancier recipes and 15 ingredients per meal for when you’re not burdened with fat loss dieting as well. Choosing familiar foods is also a good place to start. There’s nothing exotic about sticking to lean ground turkey, chicken breast, and salmon for your proteins, but it’s very effective and super convenient to not have to be a short-order cook for every meal, trying to prepare new items every time.
- Try choosing the same or similar food combinations for each kind of meal. Keep your breakfasts the same, your lunches about the same, your dinners about the same, and your evening meals about the same. In other words, you can have an omelet with low fat cheese and some greens for most of your breakfasts for a week, and can pair that with whole grain toast or protein pancakes, but if you’re making yourself a completely different recipe for breakfast every time, that might be a bit of extra work, and extra stress.
- Use the “Saved Foods” function! By loading your favorite food combinations, you can have your go-to meals pre-loaded and macros configured automatically. Instead of having to make on the fly meal design choices, you can just go to your trusted meals. This is especially useful if you find yourself with option overload when it comes time to create meals.
- Batch cooking is a BIG deal. Fill in as many of your meals a few days or a week ahead of time and let the shopping list feature tell you how much of each food to buy. Then, prep a half week or week’s worth of meals at the same time. By making all of your meals ahead of time, you solve two problems. One, is you cut down on the total weekly cooking time drastically. Two, is that you save yourself tons of the stress of having to design and create each meal from scratch. Just take the next meal out of the fridge, pop it in the microwave, and you’re good to go. No, it’s not as exciting, but it saves a world of trouble.
- Don’t stress about the sliders! Adding and subtracting food combos to fit your macros is hard work! You can make it harder by trying to micro-adjust the amounts of each ingredient of your meal to make it perfect, or you can just hit the re-balance button and have the app do it for you! By sticking to mostly whole foods, veggies, and grains, the re-balance button will save you lots of fiddling time. You can always adjust a bit to your own preferences (maybe you want a bit more egg white and a bit less turkey bacon), but just remember, there’s no “right answer.” If you meet your macros and the meal is tasty enough to eat, you’re good! Worrying about the details and trying to get the sliders just right is fine if you’re interested in being that precise. But if you’re just trying to keep things simple, just meet your macro totals and don’t sweat the small stuff!
The RP Diet App's power is to make your diet as simple OR as complex as you like. You can use the bar codes and expanded foods database if you want to have tons of variety and freedom, but both come at the expense of being more complex. If you want less diet stress, KEEP THINGS SIMPLE by choosing a few basic ingredients and let the app do the work via the shopping list and re-balance. All you have to do then is just fill in your main meals for the half-week or week ahead and Tupperware it up!