Joel Marion is a former Body for Life champion, personal trainer, established author (he's written for Men's Fitness, Muscle Media, Woman's Day, SELF, Muscle & Fitness Hers, MuscleMag International, Oxygen and more) and the brains behind the new "Cheat Your Way Thin" diet program.

"Lose weight in your sleep", boasts the advertising for the night time diet pill SomnaSlim, "or get your money back, guaranteed!" Wow! Now that's taking the whole "losing weight is easy" thing to an entirely new level.

Viper is the "hardcore" fat burner brought to us by Dymatize Nutrition, a company that's built its reputation manufacturing no-nonsense body building supplements like protein powders, weight gainers and branched chain amino acids among others.

By the looks of things, Phenphedrine appears to be brought to us by the same anonymous retailers that introduced us to such dubious weight loss favorites as Fenphedra and Nuphedragen. The last two products sport nearly identical formulations—and Phenphedrine features the same core group of ingredients, plus a couple of extras.

To Sara of Fit by Sara: “What is the best abdominal equipment to flatten my stomach?”

From Sara of Fit by Sara: “I have good news and I have bad news.  The good news is you don’t need any fancy equipment to flatten your abdominals.  The bad news is it takes more than doing abdominal crunches to get flat abs.  The key to flat abs is eating healthy (i.e., cut back on processed foods, white flour foods, chips, cookies, and sodas), and up your cardio.  Cardiovascular exercise such as walking, swimming, biking, aerobics, etc. will burn calories and reduce body fat.  Then add in the good ole abdominal crunches 3-4 x per week or yoga and/ or pilates and you’ll start to see flattening of the abdominals.  So you don’t need any equipment, just work on reducing body fat, because once you reduce body fat you’ll start seeing abdominal flattening and definition.” -Sara Holliday

*Have a question for me?  I’d love to answer it!  Email me at info@fitbysara.com and leave a comment here.