I prefer switching out high calorie food for lower calorie food of the same volume.
it's actually not that hard, the average person lives on just seven different meals 95% of the time, so work through optimizing one a week
I've been looking around a bit into diets, and it seems that "all diets work", if they have you eat less calories than you need.
But it would seem that that if is a tall order. Apparently people have a tendency to underestimate how much they eat, so just a basic "don't eat more than X calories" doesn't really work in practice, unless people are willing to do calorie counting, which isn't always practical. And if the diet is "strict", as in "you eat these things in particular and nothing else", there's a psychological (for lack of a better term) component that comes into play.
On the one hand, there's the calorie deficit. At the limit, you will probably not adhere to a 0 calorie diet. So the deficit should be "reasonable". I guess defining what that means is the hard part.
Then there's the "wants" part, and also the effect some foods have on your appetite. Eating X calories from only Mars bars is not the same as eating a "balanced" diet. In the former case, you'll probably be miserable and feel hungry all the time. In the latter, you'll probably feel OK, though at first it will probably be tough.
There's also the fact that some foods are very palatable and just make you want to keep on eating. I think this is very, very important to bear in mind. Just because food X is "healthy" and / or has low calories, it doesn't mean you can eat a ton of it without gaining weight. Fruit is one example that comes to mind, bananas in my case.
If you think of it as a different way to effect caloric restriction, then you’re on the right track.