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A LOOK AT MODERN DIETS
First let me say that there is a bit of a misconception concerning diets. A lot of people consider that they don't need to concern themselves with diets unless they want or need to lose weight. EVERYONE needs to take a look a their diet. Your diet determines how your body will operate and when you step out of the bounds concerning how your body burns food you, to a lesser or greater degree, hamper your progress.
Here's a quick look at these diets:
Zone: A sophisticated diet. This diet details how much food you need based on your protein requirements and spreads meals evenly throughout the day. It's philosophy is that most everyone functions best when 40% of your calories come from carbohydrates, 30% comes from protein and 30% from fat. It focuses heavily on regulating insulin levels and hormones.
Atkins: This diet, especially in the beginning phase, is a high fat, high protein diet. It's one of the first diets to step away from the carbohydrate diet that the AMA has been recommending for the last 15 years. It's not based on caloric restriction to lose weight. Rather, it uses a state called ketosis. This is where you limit carbs so much that your body is forced to break down fat to get enough glucose (the sugar your brain needs for fuel). You can burn off a lot of fat quickly with it.
Slim Fast: This diet is based on calorie counting. It's a high carb diet that basically uses the old fashioned "starvation technique" to lose weight.
Blood Typing: This diet recommends eating based on your blood type. It theorizes that blood types developed due to dietary changes that happened as man evolved. For example: "O" should be meat eaters while "A" should be vegetarians. This is because "O" (the first blood type) was man's first blood type, when he ate meat mostly. While "A" (the next evolved blood type) was the primary type of man as he moved to an agricultural society and began to eat more vegetables.
Metabolic Typing: This diet focuses eating according to the diet of your particular heredity. For instance, the American Eskimo eats nothing but meat and fat and has very low rates of heart disease and are generally healthy. The Mediterranean diet, however, is based on eating more carbs and couldn't tolerate an Eskimos diet. This diet, like the Zone, uses food as a 'drug' in order to not only lose weight and get in shape but also to cure chronic physical problems.
Glucose Revolution: This diet is based on the glycemic index. This is an index that measures carbs based on how quickly they are turned into glucose and raise your insulin levels. It focuses on eating complex carbs over simple ones but has a lot of the same messages that the AMA recommends.
So which of these diets are best? Is it possible that one diet can fit all? The answer is yes. A diet can work for everyone if it is based on the fact that everyone is different. There are three diets above that do this: the Zone, Atkins, Metabolic Typing. Of these three I recommend the Zone over all of them (also taking into account some of the Metabolic Typing diet's recommendations). It's based on genetics and accounts for the differences of people. It is a diet that is very precise and requires more on your part than the others. What other diet has Olympic athletes used to enhance performance and been shown by studies at universities like Harvard to be the best in reducing heart disease and diabetes? If you're not ready for the type of commitment that it requires, however, then I recommend Metabolic Typing next followed by Atkins.
I recommend that you get one of these books yourself and read all about the diet that interests you the most. You need to get all the information you can to follow a diet closely in order to get all it's benefits.