Obesity is a serious disease that is spreading at a rapid pace worldwide. Its origin is multifactorial, such as food production, cultural influences, the increased availability of food, the decline in physical activity levels of the population, etc.

In response to the simplistic theory of energy balance all these factors could be reduced to two, these being energy consumption and energy expenditure. Today's society has ensured that there is an imbalance between these two factors, providing a positive energy balance, mainly through high energy consumption and a decrease in the levels of daily physical activity. This result in people a disproportionate increase in their body weight, leading to the emergence of pathologies associated such as diabetes, hypertension, and problems in bone and connective tissue structures. Although we must not forget the relationship with the probability of occurrence of cancers or neurological diseases like Alzheimer's.

The vast majority of treatments being studied today try to offset or unbalance the imbalance between energy intake through food and energy expenditure produced by physical activity and/or exercise.

I take this letter to demand that all researchers probably are wrong trying to make our patients reduce their energy intake or increase energy expenditure with the ultimate aim of achieving success in their weight loss. Indeed, these strategies are very positive in the short term, because in the vast majority of them equal to or greater losses are earned by 10% of the pre-intervention baseline body weight. However, it appears that these strategies are quite ineffective in the long term, as these people recover 100% of their initial body weight or even increase over baseline.

Personally, I think that analyzing this imbalance only paying attention to the ends of the scale is a big mistake. In the midst of this "balance", we have a central pillar in charge of hold. This is a person. Obviously, we can find genetically inherited diseases that can help or hinder this balance. However, we must not forget that people's unique and ultimately responsible for what happens to their body. From my point of view, people should be able to balance its balance, as an offset with an increase in physical activity when energy intake is high, or by reducing energy intake when physical activity is insufficient.

In this regard, I believe that from now on all treatments for consideration should not go alone focused on telling people what to eat and how much physical activity they have to perform, but also to teach and educate them in a way that will improve their critical thinking and decision-making as far as your body is concerned. People should learn to compensate for any imbalances that occur in everyday life, regardless of the source of the imbalance.