Gone in minutes (Image: Chris Hackett)

I’M lying on a bed in a cosy room. Soothing music plays in the background. Four palm-sized paddles rest silent and cool across my midriff. In the time it takes to do a typical gym workout, I could be up to 7 inches thinner than I was before I lay down. No, I’m not in the middle of a daydream, I’m in a private clinic in London, and I’m about to have my fat zapped.

Half an hour ago, I walked into a plush reception lobby on Harley Street – a thoroughfare famed for its exclusive private medical practices. Business is good. Two beauty therapists sit in the reception area chatting to a customer. “You lost just 3 inches this time? Never mind, we’ll see if we can get a few more next week. How does Tuesday suit?”

I am visiting Harley Fit, one of a string of new companies that promise to transform your waistline in your lunch break. My visit is the culmination of a journey that began when a press release landed on my desk boasting a treatment that could make me “7 inches thinner in 20 minutes”.

It sounded too good to be true. Yet thousands of people have attended one of the hundreds of clinics around the world that offer the treatment, and scores of reviews in lifestyle magazines speak of results that are “nothing short of amazing”. At around £250 per treatment it doesn’t come cheap, but with the diet industry estimated to turn over tens of billions of dollars every year in the US alone, the appetite for …