Most diets ultimately fail because the mindset of the dieter is not right.  I think anyone attempting to lose weight needs to be committed to lifestyle change, or failure is inevitable.  Since lifestyle change implies the rest of your life, I'd say phase in the changes.  That is how weight loss has worked for me, although the budget part was certainly more cold turkey.

 

The Entrepreneur Diet Explained 

Starting a business straight out of college, with very little in savings, produced a few very lean times in our first couple of years of operation. During one of those stretches of lean months, I was forced to come up with a budget for my meals. The per-meal amount of $2.50 on which I settled was somewhat arbitrary, but not far away from a maximum I could honestly afford. In the spirit of full disclosure, I never logged my meals or counted calories beyond some mental calculations. For the purposes of a diet, I think five dollars a day is just too low. You'll end up eating the same unsatisfying meals all the time making it hard to stay on track. Plus it is just a little too restrictive.

I say $2.50 per meal, but it's better to extrapolate the number into $7.50 per day or even take that out into per week ($52.50) and per month ($225) since that's how most people shop. Doing so also emphasizes a key point to this plan and why I found it easy to adhere to the diet: money saved from one meal can be carried into other meals. So if you're like me and don't care about variety at breakfast, a bowl of oatmeal can really pad your balance for lunch, dinner, or snacks. I'm fairly sure that $7.50 a day will be adequate for most of the country. However, if sticking to the budget leaves you with a bag of rice and a loaf of day-old bread then you may need to recalculate for your cost of living.

The goal of the original endeavor was to not get evicted for skipping out on my rent, but the results spoke for themselves. I hope that this plan can be beneficial to both those who purely want to lose weight and those who may just be struggling financially and want to find a better way. In addition to just writing content for this site, I very much would like to get feedback and interaction from people who attempt this and can give insight and make the plan better.

I have not tried any marketed diet, and am not aware of any friends who have bought into a program officially. I do know some who have used a general concept to some success, but none that have made a permanent lifestyle change.