Lies, Damn Lies and Diets

The simplest diet that works is to eat not more calories than you spend. Each day. I experimented with livestrong's myplate, a slick calorie counter.

You enter the food that you ate - "penne alla arrabiata - 100g". You enter the exercise or tasks - "computer work - 480 min" and you can instantly figure out your remaining calorie budget.
It's addicting!
Furthermore it's an effective example how a quantitative approach resolves a problem.

My strongest believe is that one should pay more attention to the genuine scientific question: "How much it is?" than to the genuine philosophical question: "What is it?". Size does matter. All diets are deeply 'philosophical' in this sense, they try to answer the question of what to eat instead of how much. Contrary to this approach you have to start with the amount of calories first, and then - in order to eat enough without spending too much of your calorie budget - you learn to choose food that is calorie-cheap. You eat the vegetable dish and not the pizza. When having a calorie rich plate, you simply eat less. Don't be afraid of throwing half of a Magnum Dark Chocolate Icecream away.

Do you see how big the correlation coefficient R must be here? Linear weight loss, sans famine.