Richard McComb lies back and thinks of Brad Pitt as he battles the bulge at a Birmingham clinic.

It’s the perfect post-Christmas gift for the man who’s got everything, including a beer belly – the 25-minute six-pack.

All you do is whip off your shirt, lie back on a bed and let a stranger wrap your stomach in sensors that make your muscles contract and relax. It’s the equivalent of exercising, without exercising.

As this is happening, it also helps to think of Brad Pitt’s honed stomach in Fight Club. Well, it can’t do any harm.

Stripped to the waist, I am lying flat on my back inside Elyon Medi Spa in Birmingham, just over the road from the Mailbox at Queens Gate, Suffolk Street. I have come along to try out the future of non-invasive cosmetic weight loss and “firming.”

This involves being wired up – although not literally – to a machine that bombards the body with muscle-toning ultrasonic shock waves. The therapy can be used, amongst other things, for “rapid localised slimming.”

The small probes are attached to whichever part of the anatomy you want to tone up, including bottoms, face and boobs/moobs.

But that’s only one half of the story. The other half is the stuff of forensic science and involves analysing a client’s DNA to come up with the most effective way of treating wrinkling, sagging and sun damaged skin.

The service is being offered to VIP movie stars attending the Golden Globes in Los Angeles, so you are in A-list company. More of this later.

For now, the therapist operating the fat-fighting machine is sending small, jolting pulses into my muscles to stimulate toning. Given sufficient courses of treatment, the theory is that I will develop a six-pack, the holy grail of male self-improvement, or narcissism, depending on which side of the fence you stand.

The same technique can be used for “aesthetic lifting” in the chest area, a process which has been likened to having a boob job without going under the knife and without facing the costs and risks that surgery entails.

It is also marketed as an ideal solution for women should they want help tackling their “mother’s apron” following child birth.

It’s an odd experience, having electrically-produced pulses sent into your abdomen and I can’t imagine what it must be like for women to experience the same sporadic shock sensation in their breasts.

But it is weird rather than painful. After 10 minutes or so, I wouldn’t say I barely notice the pulses but it’s not unpleasant and my bloodpressure returns to normal following an initial attack of anxiety.

Elaine Liddy, who is operating the £30,000 VIP Lipoline Duo machine, tells me that during my 25-minute session I will have done the equivalent of 250 sit ups, although I won’t actually have moved. That certainly does make me sit up, and take notice, because I would be lucky to pull off 25 sit-ups ordinarily.

Elaine explains that during the so-called transion programme, which is being used on me, the shockwaves help to release fluid trapped in muscle fibres as well as tightening muscles to produce a six-pack effect. The excess fluid is excreted from body when you nip to the loo.

I am told that the pads attached to my belly have been soaked in a chemical formulation to aid the process. And I am naturally highly sceptical about the whole thing.

The facts, though, are these. Before the 25-minute tummy treatment, my measurement is 37.5 inches. (That’s tummy, not waist.) Afterwards, it is 36.5 inches. Somehow an inch has disappeared. I don’t know how long it will stay disappeared for, but for now it has unmistakeably gone.

Elyon recommends a course of 10 treatments and, combined with a fitness regime and diet management, it’s interesting to think what the results might be.