We evaluate the effective potential for the conventional linear Walecka non perturbatively up to one loop. This quantity is then renormalized with a prescription which allows finite vacuum contributions to the three as well as four 1PI Green's functions to survive. These terms, which are absent in the standard relativistic Hartree approximation, have a logarithmic energy scale dependence that can be tuned so as to mimic the effects of ø³ and ø4 type of terms present in the non linear Walecka model improving quantities such as the compressibility modulus and the effective nucleon mass, at saturation, by considering energy scales which are very close to the nucleon mass at vanishing density.

We use the linear delta expansion, or optimized perturbation theory, to evaluate the effective potential for the two dimensional Gross-Neveu model at finite temperature and density obtaining analytical equations for the critical temperature, chemical potential and fermionic mass which include finite N corrections. Our results seem to improve over the traditional large-N predictions.