Tips from Top Spas
People from every corner of the world, from dukes to dentists, fly thousands of miles and spend thousands of dollars to drop a few pounds and get pampered for a week at a luxury spa. While these pages can't offer you the sensuous pleasure of an herbal wrap or a soothing massage, they can provide you with the best diet tips culled from the spiffiest spas in the country.
The New Age Spa, Neversink, New York
Focus on losing inches rather than pounds. As you reduce the fat in your diet and step up your level of exercise, you may find that your weight may actually remain the same, although you look better and feel better and your clothes are looser on you. What's going on? Explains Werner Mendel, New Age's owner, "As you convert your body fat to muscle, you may not lose pounds because muscle weighs more than fat. But you will look and measure differently."
Eat a good breakfast. On-the-go people think they're being calorie wise by skimping on breakfast or skipping it completely. But that's a surefire way to sabotage your diet, says New Age's fitness director, Sandra Brown. "Breakfast here at the spa is self-serve--we have everything from hot and cold cereals to baked apples to yogurt and cottage cheese to whole-grain breads--and we encourage guests to have a good breakfast. They may be hiking or taking aerobics classes, and they need that fuel." You need it, too.
Love yourself first--the rest will follow. "If you can, through meditation or yoga, learn to love yourself, then proper eating and exercise will kick in thanks to your higher self-esteem," insists Mendel. "That's really the most important ingredient for health and well being: self-love."
Norwich Inn and Spa, Norwich, Connecticut
Make changes in your diet gradually. If you're trying to limit the amount of meat or poultry you eat, for instance, don't cut it out altogether; start by going from a whole chicken breast to half a breast, urges spa chef Bernice Veckerelli. "Also," she adds, "once a week have a meatless meal, featuring pasta or grains and vegetables, or maybe a lentil-and-brown-rice pilaf. Little by little, increase the number of these dishes." Slow but steady adjustments in your mealtime strategies will bring you greater success than attempting overnight changes, she insists.
Don't let yourself get bored. "Eat a variety of foods," says Veckerelli, even if you're having weight-loss success with certain tried-and-true items. "A lot of time people think that dieting means nothing but grapefruit, or fruit and cottage cheese, and eventually they get bored and hungry." But if you make a point of experimenting at mealtime and especially try to increase your intake of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, which are very filling and satisfying, you'll perk up your palate and be more apt to stick to your weight-loss program, too.
Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires, Lenox, Massachusetts
Enjoy what you eat. "According to a lot of studies, there's a great deal of guilt and fear associated with eating," says registered dietitian Kathie Swift, nutrition director of Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires. "But food should not just be good for us but also good-tasting. After all, taste is the first determinant of our food choices." So your diet should include many of those things you naturally enjoy eating, prepared in healthful ways and served in reasonable-size portions. "Build the pleasure principle into your eating," she urges, and you'll find weight loss much easier.
Focus on mindful eating. "Explore the 'whys' of what and how much you're eating, so you can determine whether you're eating in response to a real physiological need or to an emotional one," says Swift. Greater food awareness, she adds, usually means greater diet success.
Safety Harbor Spa and Fitness Center,
Safety Harbor, Florida
Buy smaller until you've learned to eat less. "If you found that you only had inch of shampoo left in the bottle, you might add some water to it to get few more days out of it," says Joe Kiley, former executive chef at Safety Harbor Spa. "So it stands to reason that if you had smaller amounts of food, you'd probably learn to stretch them, too. If you buy olive oil by the gallon, you don't care how much of it hits the frying pan. But if the bottle has only a few ounces in it, chances are you'd use the oil with a lighter hand." It may not be the most economical way to shop, Kiley admits, but your waistline will thank you for it.
Watch out for anything that breathes. Animal fats and animal proteins are the major sources of cholesterol and saturated fats, notes Kiley, so "make sure you don't have a lot of them. If you're buying chicken, for example, divide it into four-ounce portions for each dinner serving and freeze the rest. Then if somebody wants seconds, just say, 'You can't have any more--it's frozen! Wait till tomorrow.'"
Learn to make healthy substitutions in your favorite recipes. Kiley reports that one of his spa clients recently asked him how she could make a low-fat Caesar-salad dressing at home. "I had her identify the unhealthiest ingredients in a typical Caesar-salad dressing--egg yolks and oil. Then I pointed out to her that those two ingredients are the major components of mayonnaise, and so she could substitute a low-fat mayonnaise for them in her recipe." Similarly, she could swap some part-skim cheese for the Parmesan and Romano usually found atop Caesar salad.
Some substitutions may not be instantly identifiable, notes Kiley. But the more you learn to analyze the nutritive value of your favorite foods by reading food labels and checking a food-nutrient guidebook, the easier it'll become.
The Palms, Palm Springs, California;
The Oaks, Ojai, California
Do yoga. "One reason people overeat is that they're stressed," states registered dietitian Eleanor Brown, for 15 years a food consultant and yoga instructor at both the Palms in Palm Springs and the Oaks in Ojai. "Many people are nervous eaters--they don't even know they're doing it. Everyone is looking for peace, but you'll find it's there all the time if you can just relax your body and mind. Getting rid of tension in a positive way will keep you from eating out of tension."
As Brown notes, just about every city offers at least one yoga class (try your local Y for starters), although you can also learn yoga through reading a book or watching a video on the subject.
Write down your fitness goals. "It's been proven that if people write down their goals and read them over frequently, they'll achieve them," says Brown, who started following her own advice seven years ago at age 50. "I used to think that journal keeping had to be done in some big book, but it can be done in just a tiny, spiral-bound notebook. It's easy. It's just a matter of writing your monthly goals, then making a notation of what you will do that day to reach those goals. Then the next day, review how you did."
Not losing weight or following your exercise regimen as well as you'd like? Says Brown, "If you're not achieving your goals, it doesn't mean you're a bad person. Maybe your goals were too high. So rewrite them."
Le Pli Health Spa and Salon
at the Charles Hotel, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Eat many small meals instead of three big meals each day. "If you put a little coal into the furnace several times a day, rather than a lot of coal all at once, it will burn more efficiently," explains Liz Carlson, fitness director at Le Pli. "It's the same with your body. It'll have a hard time trying to digest large amounts of food at once, but if you eat small meals several times a day, your metabolism stays active all day and becomes a more efficient calorie burner."
A typical menu Carlson recommends goes something like this.
Early morning: oatmeal and fruit
Midmorning snack: a slice of toast and fat-free yogurt
Late-morning snack: pretzels and a small banana
Lunch: a turkey sandwich on whole-wheat bread with lettuce, tomatoes; carrot sticks
Midafternoon snack: pretzels
Late-afternoon snack: tomato juice and nonfat crackers
Dinner: fish and rice or pasta; small green salad; two servings vegetables
You should also drink plenty of water throughout the day.
It's best, Carlson adds, if you don't eat much, if anything, past 6:00 or 7:00 p.m., "when your metabolism is starting to shut down in preparation for sleep. You usually don't have much reason after that hour to expend too many calories through exercise, and if you have too many calories in your body then, they're more apt to be stored as fat."
La Costa Hotel and Spa, Carlsbad, California
Customize your weight-loss plan. At the world-famous La Costa Spa, head dietitian Karen Ladman works individually with guests to create a personalized eating plan. "We do a computer analysis," she explains. "They come in to me and say, 'This is what I've been eating,' and we feed that information into a computer. Then I go over the printout with them, indicating what I'd have them change, instead of giving everyone a set program."
You can do something similar at home. Take inventory of what you tend to eat in a typical day, and see where you can make healthy changes by reducing fat, by adding more complex carbs (switching your white rice for brown, for instance) and by making certain you're getting three to four servings of veggies and three to four fruits. "It's important," adds Ladman, "to look at your own likes and how can you can individualize your diet. There's no one thing that works for everybody."
The Greenhouse, Arlington, Texas
Limit alcohol. Alcohol can harm your diet in a number of tricky ways, warns registered dietitian Cindy Wachtler, a former nutritionist at the renowned Cooper Clinic in Dallas and currently a nutritionist at the Greenhouse spa. "People think that because it contains no fat grams, they can have as much as they want, and yet the body utilizes it much the same way it utilizes fat," says Wachtler. What's more, she adds, it impairs your good sense.
"Drink a glass of wine before dinner and suddenly the food looks better and tastes better, and your judgment of quantities will diminish," she says. "You have to approach it with respect, because it does things to your body that you're not aware of."
Green Valley Spa and Tennis Resort,
St. George, Utah
Get out of the deprivation mentality. "In order to experience a lifetime of good health and ideal body weight, you must be able to enjoy the process, not just the results," says Green Valley Spa owner Alan Coombs. "If you look upon exercise as work and reducing fat consumption as deprivation, then your efforts at losing weight will always be a battle and either you'll fail or your success will have been won at a terrible price."
The Phoenix Spa, Houston, Texas
Go ahead--play with your food! In fact, it's a terrific idea if you're trying to limit your intake, says Angie Day, the Phoenix's executive director, until its closing in late 1993. "When you go out to a restaurant, order food with lots of 'play' potential, things that keep your hands busy and take longer to eat--hot soup, for example, or lobster in the shell," she advises. "They'll satisfy you and you may not eat as much as you would of some other dishes."
Eat before you eat. "Have a light salad--maybe with some cucumbers and tomatoes and a little nonfat dressing--before you go to a party or a restaurant," urges Day. "That way, during cocktail hour you'll have a full stomach and you won't be tempted as much to pick on the more fattening hors d'oeuvres."
Wear something tight fitting when you go out to eat. "Being a little uncomfortable is a nice little reminder that you're trying to lose weight, and it will keep you from overeating," insists Day. "It's a trick that works for me--absolutely."
Satisfy your need for the taste you're really craving. Have a hankering for something crunchy, like potato chips? Then eating a banana or drinking a glass of tomato juice just won't do it for you; afterward you'll still long for that crunch. So, advises Day, make sure you have a crunchy something that won't blow your diet--a small bowl of bite-size shredded wheat, for example. "When choosing a snack," she says, "identify the taste and texture you truly crave and look to satisfy that need."
