That '80% of diets fail' stat finally clicked for me after 3 tries

I kept seeing that number everywhere and always figured it was just a scare tactic from the weight loss industry. Then I actually read the original study from 2007, the one with 200 people tracked for 2 years. Turns out they counted anyone who lost 5% of their body weight and kept it off for a year as a failure. That's a weird bar. I lost 12 pounds last spring, gained 4 back over the holidays. By their math I'm a failure but by my math I'm still down 8. Why do we let a rigid definition decide if something works? Has anyone else dug into the fine print behind a famous stat and found it was more about the wording than the truth?

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