What diet has worked best?

I cannot lie. In the early 2000s I followed Suzanne Somers books and it worked great. It was food combining nonsense and I didn't believe for a second that combining or keeping foods separate somehow made a difference to how many calories were metabolized, but it had a couple of rules that made a huge difference to me. You weren't supposed to combine starchy carbs with fat in the same meal. So you could have cereal, but only with skim milk. You could have toast, but not with butter or peanut butter--all fruit preserves were okay. You could have pasta, but only with fat-free sauces (like a marinara). If you had a steak, for example, you could have all the vegetables you wanted, but no potato or rice in the same meal.