The management of obese patients should be articulated in five levels of care [16]:

Primary care, although not capable of treating obesity according to literature [6], is crucial in preventing the development of overweight and its comorbidities by educating patients to correct lifestyle and behavior and, where this is proven inefficacious, in directing the patient to the right level of care avoiding delays.

All the levels of care may prove beneficial at some point in the management of a single obese subject. Intensive care levels such as day hospital, day care, and residential approaches represent an essential step when obesity and its comorbidities have reached a high level, when the impact on quality of life is heavy, when many interventions are needed in order to treat the patient’s condition, or when lower levels of care have proven ineffective. Taking advantage of these approaches will prevent acute events to be treated via hospitalization with evident advantages in terms of health, quality of life, and economic expenses.

The advantages of a multidisciplinary team approach have been outlined. Yet, there are some disadvantages to be considered. Compared to a single-clinician approach, a multidisciplinary one may bring to fragmentation, resulting in the patient receiving different and at times conflicting advice from the different components of the team. In addition, in the absence of excellent and constant communication among health professionals, there may be no clinician aware of the full clinical picture of the patient.

The major difficulties are thus substantially caused by education of the single health professionals, still not sufficiently teamwork-oriented in most countries [17, 18].

In order to prevent the abovementioned drawbacks, the whole team should be trained to apply a complex model of multidimensional treatment, to have a consistent approach to patients. The therapeutic roles and areas of intervention of each member should be well defined at the beginning and coordinated within the team. In addition, it is essential that clinicians, while maintaining their specific professional roles, share the same basic rationale and use a similar language with patients. It is crucial to have team meetings at regular times in order to evaluate and discuss treatment processes, strategies, and issues. Every health care professional should have a comprehensive view of the patient’s clinical management and condition, identify his own role in the therapeutic plan, correctly establish the timing of his intervention, and coordinate it with those performed by others.

Moreover, team members should be helped to reflect on their attitudes toward obese patients and to counteract widespread weight biases that are relevant for an effective therapeutic relationship and management of obesity.

From a patient’s perspective, multidisciplinary approach is not always seen as the best choice. The main reason why many patients still prefer traditional dietetic interventions is that the latter is much less time-consuming. Thus, only people with flexible schedules or a lot of spare time can reasonably take advantage of a multidisciplinary treatment. Moreover, obesity is still merely seen by many patients, health care professionals, and institutions as a benign condition caused by a lack in willpower, thus making a demanding treatment very difficult to be accepted [15].