"The Carbo-Calorie Diet" by Donald S. Mart, Dolphin Books, 1973, is a great book far in advance of the South Beach Diet and the Atkins Diet. Basically, Donald Mart figures out an equation that lets you lose about 5lbs a week if you hold your 'carbo-calories to exactly 100 each day.
The formula is Carbocalories = (20 * Carbohydrates + Calories)/24.
I have taken the entire USDA nutrition dataset from USDA.gov and calculated the carbocalories for all thousands of foods listed. These web pages are 5 megabytes each:
They shouldn't be this big. I'm working on that.