Rent someone’s home or apartment for a day, a week or a month. Airbnb has turned the process into a huge business that operates in 191 countries and over 34,000 cities. Now, a new service based on a similar model has started. Overweight people can rent normal-weight or thin people to eat for them. Thinrent has a chance to become as large a rental service as any in the world.
Over 2.1 billion people in the world are obese or overweight, according to University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The problem is particularly bad in the United States. The CDC reports that 35% of Americans are obese, which totals 79 million people. America will be the first test market. Obesity cost the U.S. economy $175 billion in 2008, according to the same CDC study. Add people who are defined as overweight, and the national total is 70% of the population.
The CDC also reports that 1.7% of Americans are underweight. Many of these are because of eating disorders. The number of people who are normal weight is about 30% of Americans.
One of the primary causes of obesity is people overeat when they are alone. This may eliminate the shame of large portions consumed in public. It is certainly hard to control food consumption when people are out of sight.
Thinrent marries an underweight or normal-weight person with one who is obese or overweight. The service has a daily fee for the normal weight person to consume some of the food the overweight or obese person would consume, and an extra fee for the amount of weight lost. The normal weight person is available during all waking hours.
Some eating has to do with spot binging, a period when a normal-weight person would be particularly helpful.
The goal of Thinrent is to get people who are normal weight to consume 500 to 1,000 calories a day of what the overweight or obese person would otherwise take in. The challenge is that over time the process might make the normal-weight person overweight.
The normal rate to overweight process is among the largest challenges of Thinrent, after finding people who want to use it to lose weight. However, the business is in its earliest stages so the problem may still be ironed out.
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