An Airbnb for Overweight People

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 5:20AM EST · Published Jul 25, 8:05AM EDT

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An Airbnb for Overweight People — © Thinkstock

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.

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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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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.