Destination: Arizona, Baja : Low-Fat Desert : Rancho La Puerta and Canyon Ranch, two of the world’s best ‘ranch’ spas, are close by, but there are differences. For starters, about $1,000 a week.

If there’s anything I know about, it’s spas. I’ve been on the circuit for years and have trekked to far-flung corners of the earth for the spa-going experience. Closer to home, I’ve gone for tuneups to a score of American fitness camps.

Although I’ve never met a spa I didn’t like, I do have my favorites, and topping my list are two “ranches”--Canyon Ranch Health and Fitness Resort in Tucson and Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Mexico. These wellness camps are both Southern California-adjacent, and they differ in style and price. But one is not better than the other. The choices are personal, and as far as I’m concerned, a stay at either place is a really good time.

Many Americans check into a spa when their body starts resembling a U-Haul trailer. Minutes after arrival, they work themselves into a feverish pitch, heading to the gym for some body sculpturing and adventurous weightlifting. All day long they’re booked solid working to shed a few pounds and flatten the stomach.

Years ago, when I started going to spas, I was like that too, a kamikaze fitness fanatic with a schedule that barely left time for a nap. Today, at 47, I have come to terms with my body and know that I cannot overhaul it in one week. Finally, I know what spas are for--they’re just another form of therapy. I go to either of the ranches when my head is a mess, when I’m jumping out of my skin. Once there, I proceed at my own happy pace. If it feels good to join the dropouts by the pool hiding behind their paperbacks, that’s what I do. Unlike some spas, the ranches have great intelligence, allowing guests to do as they please, and it’s perfectly respectable to do nothing.

Both of the ranches are one-stop co-ed fitness emporiums where the foundation for revitalization is vigorous exercise and fresh mountain air. Each day, approximately 50 different get-fit options are offered at both: aerobics, toning and stretching, walking and tennis clinics, calisthenics, tai chi, country line dancing, water classes, and weight and circuit training. All this alternates with massages, herbal wraps, yoga, and a host of New Age cures to make a slightly better you.

Rancho La Puerta was founded in 1940 by a Britain-based native of Transylvania named Edmond Szekely and his American wife, Deborah. (Twenty years later, Mrs. Szekely founded the equally health-conscious but ritzier Golden Door in Escondido, Calif., which the Szekelys still own and operate.) In an adobe hut at the foot of a mountain sacred to the native Kumeyaay, the Szekelys established a health camp with a philosophy of fitness, spirituality and vegetarianism. Forty miles southeast of San Diego and three miles south of the Baja California border at Tecate, RLP is at 1,800 feet at the base of Mt. Kuchumaa, and has an idyllic year-round climate--smogless and fogless, with clear days and starry nights.

Canyon Ranch was born in 1978, after local real estate developer Mel Zucherman watched his chain-smoking father die of lung cancer, and watched his own health deteriorate. “I was a man who had everything,” he says, “high blood pressure, high cholesterol and ulcers.” After visiting several spas, Zucherman experienced the miracle of restored health and knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life: launch his own place.

Canyon Ranch started, in Zucherman’s words, as a “fat farm,” but has evolved into an elite fitness retreat with full-time doctors, psychologists, nurses, dietitians and physiotherapists. Zucherman is a believer in the mind-body connection--that emotional and spiritual health is as important to overall well-being as physical fitness--and everything at the ranch is calculated to help guests “open themselves to new personal possibilities,” according to marketing director Brian Shultz. In 1989, Zucherman took his complete bag of Tucson tricks to Lenox, Mass., and opened Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires. Since then, executive fitness and renewal has become a big deal, and corporations send their burned-out executives to both of his ranches to unwind.

At Canyon Ranch in Tucson, summer guests fork over a minimum of $2,564.00 (which includes $2,040 for basic accommodations, plus an 18% service charge and tax) to be cosseted for one week in a single-occupancy room with television, VCR, telephone and air conditioning. Expensive? You betcha.

The ranch lists among its assets a 62,000-square-foot spa; a sophisticated medical facility with an a la carte list of services, including cardiac treadmill stress tests, bone density evaluations and metabolic rate testing; 60 massage therapists, and a 55-member “health and healing staff” that includes medical doctors and behavioral and other therapists to deal with “the inner child,” depression, stress, disabling pain, sexual problems, sleep disorders and compulsions. Guests can sign up for 125 different hikes (offered at different levels of difficulty), biking in spectacular Sabino Canyon (two miles away) and an assortment of gentle walks. Other services include hypnosis, “life regressions,” smoking cessation and several dozen pampering beauty and body therapies.

In my estimation, Canyon Ranch is worth its considerable price. Few guests spend $2,600 just to lose five pounds. Many, probably most, arrive at the ranch feeling just as I did during a recent personal crisis--tired, depressed, depleted. I had been on a junk food rampage and had learned how to chain-smoke unfiltered cigarettes. One week later, I had kicked the nicotine habit, had returned to the proper dietary track and my self-esteem was soaring. I felt transformed.

In the expensive realm of health spas, Rancho La Puerta was made for bargain hunters. The summer package (including minimum accommodations) starts at about $1,630 for one week, including tax, and the services, as such services go, are inexpensive: $30 for a massage, $10 for a manicure, $15 for an herbal wrap. Another big difference is that at RLP “rooms come without televisions, telephones and VCR’s because you can’t find solitude when you have noise,” according to the Szekelys’ son Alex, who now runs the spa. RLP guests live in rustic but cozy colonial style haciendas with fireplaces, patios, private gardens and ceiling fans, but no air conditioning. Facilities are spread over 300 acres so “the world doesn’t seep in, and guests never go near a car or a road,” Szekely says.

Canyon Ranch, located in northeast Tucson, 21 miles from the airport, is much more compact and not quite as remote or as close to nature.

Then there’s the matter of capacity. Canyon Ranch accommodates 300 guests per week (usually 40% men, 60% women), and Rancho La Puerta accepts 150 (men account for about 20%). At both places you’ll find the Hollywood aristocracy and a spiffy clientele of super-achievers seeking respite from the fast lane. During one stay at Canyon Ranch, I spotted Robin Williams, Kirk Douglas, Courtney Love and George C. Scott. Barbra Streisand and Donna Karan had just checked out. RLP guests have included William F. Buckley, Oprah, Madonna, Jody Foster and Sophia Loren.

At RLP, guests arrive on Saturdays for a minimum one-week stay; at Canyon Ranch, guests arrive any day of the week for a minimum two-day stay and can stay as long as they like. According to Katie Garber, CR public relations director, one guest stayed 136 nights. The barriers between people seem to crumble more quickly at Rancho La Puerta because everyone arrives and leaves together. Maybe it’s because you pump and stretch with your new friends seven days straight, but the camaraderie is infectious; the experience always takes me back to my summer camp days.

Will RLP ever hire a therapist to help you cope, or a doctor to give you a physical? Not a chance. “Therapists take the power away from you,” says Alex Szekely, reflecting another big difference between the two wellness camps. “If you need to see a doctor, there are doctors in San Diego. Our guests learn to listen to their “inner voice” . . . . If someone’s going through something difficult, guests talk to other guests or to a staff member,” he says.

I could forsake almost anything else at RLP, but not the hikes. The internal chatter always stops as we struggle up the trail on the eight-mile sunrise hike. “Don’t forget to breathe deeply,” says our guide, who has the stamina of a decathlon medalist. Back home, I try to recall the smell of the sage, the silence, the silliness, how serene I felt.

Both ranches provide a slew of lectures that deal with everything from obesity to impotence. At a recent trip to Canyon Ranch, I counted 25 complimentary lectures during the week. RLP’s lecture schedule also covers a dizzying spectrum of topics, though none is so remarkable as the “Inner Journey” program launched in 1986 by fitness director Phyllis Pilgrim to “help guests be less neurotic.”

Pilgrim, who studied yoga in India and has been practicing and teaching yoga for 34 years, offers a one-hour session Mondays through Fridays at no extra charge. Her lectures deal with spirituality, mind-body awareness, the acceptance of change and Eastern religions. But when the candles are lit and Tibetan bells signal the start of meditation, it is an affirmation of why I go to RLP.

“I try to help guests clear their mind and experience their inner space,” Pilgrim says. “Most people have never experienced this; in fact, many don’t know what I’m talking about.”

As for the food, there are lots of clever low-fat, low-cal entrees coming out of both ranch kitchens. Guests can eat, really eat, free of guilt. I had bread, pizza, caffeinated coffee, desserts--as much or as little as I wanted. Now entering its 54th year, RLP serves vegetarian fare and grows its food without pesticides in a six-acre garden on the property. RLP guests get butter with their bread and help themselves in the buffet line, while CR guests order from a menu, have a pasta bar and a salad bar, and feast on no-fat yogurt with no-fat chocolate sauce, waffles, risotto, hamburgers, French fries, lamb and beef tenderloin.

Both ranches generally have a few “prom queens” in residence, but they’re definitely the exception. Having visited spas such as the Greenhouse in Dallas where ladies wear makeup and jewelry to dinner, I prefer both ranches, where most everyone walks around looking disorderly. Another wonderful feature of both places is that they’re ideal for singles. At dinner, I was seated with others who had come solo, and the singles tables were always the liveliest.

At the end of my stay at either ranch, I have so much energy I can’t stop squirming, but I’m so calm I’ve forgotten my ZIP Code. The last time I left Rancho La Puerta, I got off the plane, walked into my house and set off the alarm. I couldn’t remember the security code. No, my hips don’t disappear, but my stress sure does.

GUIDEBOOK: Ranch Renewals

Canyon Ranch Health and Fitness Resort, 8600 E. Rockcliff Road, Tucson, Ariz. 85715; tel. (800) 742-9000. Summer rates (mid-June to mid-Sept.) for eight days/seven nights: about $2,600 single, $2,350 double occupancy, including service charge and tax, five spa services, round-trip transfers from Tucson airport. Winter rates about 35% higher.

Rancho La Puerta, Tecate, Baja California; P.O. Box 463057, Escondido, Calif. 92046; tel. (800) 443-7565. Summer rates for eight days/seven nights: about $1,600 single, $1,300 double, including service charge and tax, round-trip transfers from San Diego airport. Winter rates about 10%-15% higher.

Rates for both spas are for minimum accommodations, three meals daily, fitness classes and use of all facilities. Extra medical and salon treatments are a la carte.