Phase One of the South Beach Diet is very close to the one that Richard Bernstein advises. It's low carb. Unfortunately, some people think that low carb means 'high' in something else which is not true. Most of the body's cholesterol is produced by our own liver in any case. The more carbs we eat, the more the liver produces. Eating fats just adds calories to our diet which won't help you lose weight.
If you eat a reasonable size of protein at dinner (the size of a deck of cards), and veggies and salad food, you will do much better than depending on meals that come from packages or fast food restaurants.
Yet you can ruin this way of eating by pouring on bottled dressing like Ranch or French, drinking soft drinks (even diet drinks), or by breading the meat or chicken, etc.
Read labels. There is a lot of salt, sugar, chemical ingredients, MSG, hydrogenated oils, nitrates and so on in almost all of these packaged or bottled products and these will hurt you in the long run.
Sometimes you have to re-think meals. At dinner I have a "salad food plate" with different cut up raw veggies: bell peppers, cucumbers, broccoli and cauliflower florets, mushrooms, radishes, any veggie you can eat raw.
We all pick from this plate. I just take some and eat them raw with dinner. My daughter will take some on her plate and put olive oil on them as a salad. They are filling and have lots of vitamins. (And good for regularity 
).
And fresh greens. Along with leafy green lettuce, buy a bundle of cilantro and parsley. I clip off the stems, wash them and put them along side the lettuce and eat them by hand with dinner.
We might not eat an entire green (or red or yellow) bell pepper at the meal so I store them in plastic bags in the fridge. Cleaned leafy greens can also be kept for several days in one of those plasic grocery bags. I put a piece of paper towel along the bottom and dump in the cilantro, parsley, spinach leaves, etc. and tie up the bag. So, there will be at least 2 of these plastic bags in our fridge with all this salad food ready to be eaten.
