Fashion 87 : Spas Shape Up to Keep in Step With the New Fitness Courses

Marie Manchester was flying to her weight-loss spa in Palm Springs when she broke down and ate a pack of M&M;’s.

“I just needed it,” says the 47-year-old Seattle woman, whose bout with the scales has turned her into a fitness spa hopper in search of a body fix.

She’s been pampered, exercised and deprived of sweets at spas from La Costa to Miami, Houston to Sonoma County. At the Palms, in Palm Springs, she just lost eight pounds in seven days.

“They’re all about the same,” she says, rating the Palms “friendly” on her mental tally.

But look closer and you’ll find fitness resorts in a competitive dash to deliver the latest body wisdom to an increasingly aware public. In Southern California, home of about a dozen such spas, a peat moss mud bath, a seaweed body wrap and underwater body massage are among the newest treatments given.

Some spas even offer psychic readings. At La Costa, outside Carlsbad, Joan Magner attempts to read the future for spa-goers.

“They want to know: ‘Will I lose weight?’ ” Magner says. “In most instances, the answer is: ‘Sure.’ ”

Though spas pitch diverse methods for rejuvenating body and soul, they form a consensus behind two conservative trends. Most are phasing out high-impact aerobic exercise for less-strenuous workouts. And most insist patrons eat more than in the past, claiming a dieter will lose at least as much weight on 1,000 calories a day as on 600 or 700 calories.

The spas also see their focus changing from simple pampering or weight loss to the young-urbanite goals of stress reduction and “creating a balance.”

Actress Linda Gray, who recently spent a $3,000 week at Cal-a-Vie fitness spa outside San Diego, says she uses spa time to “re-evaluate priorities.

“I’m very inner , and I needed to get in touch with myself,” she says, recalling her routine at Cal-a-Vie: “They work your behind off until lunch, then you get things like hydrotherapy baths, seaweed wraps and aroma-therapy massage--so that by dinner, you’re a total noodle.”

“Am I coherent?” asks another Cal-a-Vie visitor, limp after a massage. Designer D. N. Evans of Newport Beach says she takes a spa vacation “instead of having a nervous breakdown.”

Spas differ most over questions of comfort versus asceticism, coddling versus boot camp.

Two Bunch Palms in Desert Hot Springs goes for the coddling--at $90 to $350 a night. Clients are plied by strong Swedish or pressure-point shiatsu massages, rocked and shaken by Trager massages and soaked in hot springs.

There are no exercise classes, and tennis courts are used “maybe once a month,” says co-director Dana Smith. The latest Two Bunch treatment is a green clay body rejuvenator, which visitors are urged to save until last “as icing on the cake.”

At the Golden Door, a $3,000-a-week retreat outside Escondido, the philosophy is exercise “from dawn until dusk,” says director Annharriet Buck. The staff muffles that blow by referring to a workout as “movement” and with constant doting.

Despite the niceties, Buck, a psychologist, calls a week at the Golden Door a “stripping process” aimed at “changing lives.” The spa increased its spiritual bent two years ago with its Inner Door program, a series of lectures for spa-goers exploring intuition, “mind fitness” and “the magic side of ourselves.”

The Ashram in Calabasas, at $1,600 a week, doesn’t try to mask its grueling intent.

“We give suffering,” director Anne Marie Bengstrom says. “The results are terrific. A man loses 12 to 14 pounds in a week, and a woman loses 8 to 10 pounds.”

The program--a Spartan diet and intense exercise--has changed little in a dozen years, except for a growing emphasis on tai chi and long hikes, she says. A typical day means yoga, weightlifting, aerobics, water exercises, hours of hiking and a massage.

“We tell them: ‘You need to come here and suffer because you feel you don’t deserve to love yourself until you suffer.’

“We ask them ‘Why?’ And ‘When are you going to stop doing that to yourself?’ ” Bengstrom says.

“State of the art” at the Palms means dropping almost all high-impact aerobic exercise for less-bouncy sessions and using giant rubber bands, weighted balls or water for resistance.

“The next big movement in conditioning will be body contouring through aerobics,” says owner Sheila Cluff, referring to wrist-weight-aided aerobic sessions.

Cluff, who also owns the Oaks in Ojai, says European massages and spa treatments are gaining favor with guests, who no longer consider that realm “decadent.”

Since opening 15 months ago, Cal-a-Vie in Vista has introduced

two European treatments to visitors. Spokesman Ann Reis describes “hydrotherapy” as an underwater massage that stimulates the lymphatic system. With a new seaweed wrap, patrons are “painted” with a green seaweed paste, then wrapped in a thermal metallic blanket. Part of the two-hour detoxifying treatment is to listen to “sea music” on headphones, she says.

Recently, Murrieta Hot Springs Resort and Health Spa, a $400-to-$1,300-a-week spa in Riverside County, also created a mud bath formula combining peat moss, sea kelp and clay. The moss, claims spokesman Diane Bradle, “holds warmth” and has “healing properties.”

At La Costa, near Carlsbad, a mega-spa with two golf courses, seven restaurants and 482 rooms, medical director Gordon Reynolds espouses a “middle of the road” fitness philosophy.

“We’re not giving people a life style that is different or odd,” says the former Redlands obstetrician. Neither do they impose a routine. A visitor can opt for the sedentary pleasures of indoor or outdoor massages, an afternoon at the new La Costa Institute of Beauty or more vigorous fitness routines.

“Everyone wants to be pampered at a spa,” Reynolds says. “But now it’s ‘I want to get fit’ too. We’re getting a surprising number of people who have never exercised. Everyone can use information to help them live longer.”

That information is relayed in lectures or over meals. In La Costa’s Spa Dining Room, dietitian Kathy Hall sits picking at her 300-calorie barbecue chicken lunch and counters such dietary myths as “cottage cheese creates cellulite.”

Food Combinations

Still the most frequently quoted gospel among guests is the 1985 book “Fit For Life,” in which authors Harvey and Marilyn Diamond advocate eating foods in specific combinations. As a result, some La Costa guests refuse to eat fruit with yogurt, Hall says. And at the Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa, a health resort featuring five-night, $1,630 packages, director Wendy Aronson notes:

“Last night we served strawberries at the end of the meal, and one man said he wouldn’t eat the strawberries because he’d just read the book.”

Spas generally serve low-fat, low-sodium, high-complex-carbohydrate diets, while touting higher calorie totals than in years past. Hall says she’s planning a new spa menu for La Costa featuring a “pasta of the day.”

Since 1984, the Golden Door has doubled the calorie intake of guests, from about 500 to 1,000 daily. Buck and other spa directors back the larger meals, because they say dieting too strenuously leaves less energy for exercise and may cause the body to burn fewer calories, compensating for a perceived threat of starvation.

As spas turn attention from weight loss to general health, they’re also reaching out to those who have never considered themselves spa types. At La Costa, where the basic rate is about $2,500 a week, the spa attracts business conferences through its new multimillion-dollar meeting facility.

On a smaller scale, the Palms, for about $1,000 to $1,500 a week, courts visitors with “stop smoking,” “Christmas shopping” and “art appreciation” weeks.

Many spas also inform guests on such unrelated topics as business and numerology.

But as spas spread their message of fitness and renewal, they risk doing a job too well.

Shirley Hatos of Beverly Hills stopped going to the Golden Door after about 10 visits.

“After each time I’d go, I’d incorporate more and more into my life that I’d learned there,” Hatos says. “It took me quite a few years to make my own home a Golden Door, peaceful and quiet.

“Now if my husband wants salami,” she adds, “he has to buy it himself.”