Lots of these fad diets are crap honestly. The best way I found is not that starve yourself stuff... you just gotta work with your body.
Eating like 6 meals a day spaced 3 hours apart (like 300 calories or so each) enabled me to lose 12lbs in a month... which is very impressive when I was 170lbs to start with and dropped to 158 @ 6foot tall, though I did also work out at a gym a good bit. Spacing meals like this ups your metabolism.
