The fundamentals of diet all rely on the D.E.M. (Don’t Eat Much) diet plan. Everything else you look at is focused on tweaking that central plan to improve nutritional quality, palatability, ease of use, and effectiveness.
Ease of Use
If your plan isn’t easy to use, then you’re not very likely to be able to follow it. That’s where we get things like points counting, food playing cards, pre-prepared meals, diets with only one or a small subset of included fuels, no carb diets, and so forth. Most of us just don’t want to weigh and measure our food, or to record everything we eat in a given day. We’re not accustomed to having to plan our meals as if we are a Home Economics major planning the menu for the local senior center.
Nutritional Quality
Simply leaving out foods or focusing on a small subset of food choices is generally a non-starter for most people. The best diet plans instead concentrate on making sure you have a well-balanced array of choices you truly like so you can ensure the nutritional content of your diet. Losing weight at the expense of your heart muscle or organ failure or mental clarity is unwise.
Palatability
If your food does not taste good, it is going to be difficult to stay on a diet plan. Reducing fat from foods can make it difficult to eat them when you’re first starting out. You miss that fatty taste. Over time your taste will actually change, so if the bad taste is simply coming from fat reduction, hang in there. Ditto for salt. I like the taste of salt but my blood pressure does not. Because of that, I rely on salting food just before eating it and using iodized sea salt instead of standard table salt. Sugar is another food that is difficult to wean ourselves from. Some sugar substitutes work well, but in general it is best to simply reduce the sweetness of the things we eat until we can handle a lower sugar content without having it bother us. You do get used to lower sugar contents. As an example, a few months ago I tried a Twinkie. One bite was all I could handle. It was too sweet, too fatty, and actually tasted terrible to me. Score one for changing tastes!
Effectiveness
No matter which plan you use, it won’t work if it doesn’t actually reduce the number of calories you eat and encourage an increase in your activity level. There are other things that can contribute, though. An increase in fiber can help your digestive processes. Reduction in fat and an increase in carbohydrate can help you have sufficient bulk in your diet to sustain yourself without as many hunger pangs. Some foods also help regulate your metabolism, making the food you eat work for you instead of against you.
Examine any diet plan in light of these factors. With so many plans making the rounds, surely there is a plan that you can either use as is or adapt for your personal requirements.