Which diet works best?

I've recently come across this question, and a couple of similar ones:

Which diet works best?
How can I lose weight fast?  
How can I lose weight before Christmas, or New Years?

The answer to the first question is simple:  NO DIET is the one that works best.  Diets, particularly named, fad diets, tend to be about deprivation of one thing or another:  No carbs;  No protein;  No sugar;  No fruit;  Only fruit.  Etc. etc.   None of the tricks work, because they aren't sustainable.

What IS sustainable is learning a solid Nutrition Plan.  That means figuring out the right kinds of healthy foods to eat, and how much of each to eat, and to some degree, when.  

For me, I stick to lean meats, fresh or frozen vegetables (no sauce usually, just veggies), and whole grains like brown rice or quinoa.   For meats I weigh them out before I cook them, usually eating 4-6 oz as a portion.   Quinoa or rice I cook, then measure out 1/2 cup.   Veggies I don't measure because they are calorically small, so you can eat a lot of them.  An entire head of lettuce has around 30 calories, so load up on these, just avoid drowning them in salad dressing.   I measure out 2 tbsp of salad dressing at a time.

There are a lot of formulas for how many calories you need per day, but the general numbers are a good starting place.  Men usually need a 2000 calorie per day diet, women about 1800.  Active men bump up to 2400-2500, active women 2000 or so.    To lose weight at a sustainable rate of 1 lb per week, create a 500 calorie deficit.   More than 2 lbs per week, unless you have a lot of fat to lose, can be unhealthy and not sustainable, so don't under eat too drastically.   Under eating drastically can actually slow your metabolism and cause you to burn off muscle and horde your body fat stores.

So can you lose weight fast?  Not in a healthy way that will keep it off.   Can it be done in the next month before the holidays?  Probably not, but that doesn't mean you can't start on the right path now and keep that going through the holidays and into next year.

With luck, we all have a few more years on this planet to improve.  Know you can always improve, get stronger, be in better shape.   We are all a work in progress.