  We discuss a renormalization scheme for relativistic baryon chiral
perturbation theory which provides a simple and consistent power counting for
renormalized diagrams. The method involves finite subtractions of dimensionally
regularized diagrams beyond the standard $\bar{\rm MS}$ scheme of chiral
perturbation theory to remove contributions violating the power counting. This
is achieved by a suitable renormalization of the parameters of the most general
effective Lagrangian. In addition to simplicity our method has the benefit that
it can be easily applied to multiloop diagrams. As an application we discuss
the mass and the scalar form factor of the nucleon and compare the results with
the expressions of the infrared regularization of Becher and Leutwyler.
