**1. Introduction**

Study and management of obesity are hot points in medical research and healthcare services worldwide. This increasing importance of studying and combating obesity came as a result of rapid pandemic prevalence of obesity and being one of the most preventable risk factors of many comorbidities. The traditional management of obesity included many disciplines of healthcare providers through many remedies including dietary manipulations, physical activity (PA) plans, behavioral modification, pharmacotherapy, bariatric surgery, and other complementary therapies [1]. Shift toward trial of complementary methods, such as acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic spinal manipulation, and herbal remedies, reflects the limited success rates of the nonsurgical methods for management of obesity. However, single

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

use of a complementary remedy showed small effects with unconvincing evidence in addition to some adverse effects [2]. Low success rates of nonsurgical treatments of obesity and inadequate results may not only result in a management failure but may increase severity of obesity [3]. Even in surgical solutions of obesity, one can find a promising rate of weight loss in short-term basis, but after few years, weight regained especially if not combined with lifestyle modifications such as compliance to dietary and physical activity prescriptions [4]. Accordingly, it can be concluded that single treatment modality is not sufficient for obesity management even with bariatric surgery. The multifactorial nature of obesity as a chronic disease emphasizes this theory. Combined different remedies for weigh loss such as diet plus physical activity achieved a synergistic result rather than using combined protocols in the same remedy such as low-fat diet and low-carbohydrate diet [5].

Teamwork management including different disciplines is increasingly emphasized in management of many chronic diseases. Depth of collaboration among allied disciplines created many levels of multimodal intervention. A multidisciplinary-team approach refers to the cooperation among members from different specialties, but each one stays within his boundaries and works independently or sequentially, each from his or her own disciplinaryspecific perspective (i.e., no overlap), in order to improve patient care. The second level is interdisciplinary approach, which harmonizes links between the different disciplines, in a coordinated and integrated fashion toward a common goal for the patient. The third level is transdisciplinary team in which specialists work jointly using a shared conceptual framework that draws together discipline-specific approaches, to address a common problem. Here, the traditional boundaries among different specialties were transcended [6]. Obesity is a good candidate for applying any of these levels for teamwork management because of its multifactorial nature, diversity in response to separate treatment approaches, and predisposition to multiple comorbidities belong to different medical specialties.
