Hey Sam, I’m working on my “six pack” and I stumbled on the Flex Belt today and I’m interested, especially after having read a lot of positive reviews. What are your thoughts? This of course would be an addition to regular exercise and diet. —Jeremy, Los Angeles

Here’s a fitness axiom: there’s no shortcut to real results.

In my humble opinion, the Flex Belt is just modern snake oil.  While I disagree with the science behind the product, I also don’t know anyone who’s owned one, so I decided to investigate. I did several news searches and found no editorial articles that weren’t copied word-for-word (or pretty close) from the company press releases. I did however stumble upon this post on “Today’s Distraction,” a blog about, you guessed it: distractions.