Trips That Will Change Your Life: Uncover The Real You

"WHO IS THAT?"

It was a disturbing question on many levels, but mostly because I was asking it of myself. Out loud. While looking in the bathroom mirror. After a shower. Totally nude.

A little voice in my head immediately tried to make me feel better: You’ve given birth to two children, Vicki. The second issued forth just six months ago. If it took nine months to put it on, it’ll take nine months to take it off. Plus, those little girlies are soooo worth it. And at least you fit back into your Seven jeans. But there was another voice in my head, too. She was louder. And more pragmatic: Shut the hell up and DO something about it, you whiner.

So when I read about Stowe Mountain Lodge, a new, über-luxurious resort at the base of Spruce Peak and Mount Mansfield in Vermont, I knew I had to get my jiggling gut north. It wasn’t the über-luxury that called to me — the rooms with private balconies and stone fireplaces and flat-screens and organic cotton linens; the indoor/outdoor pool that looks out toward the slopes; the personal concierge service that customizes each guest’s visit, whether you’re skiing or fly-fishing or golfing the 18-hole course that winds along the mountainside; the restaurant that uses only local cheeses and produce and grains because Vermont, as a state, is just green like that; the 21,000-square-foot spa with crazy stuff like reclining “sound chairs” and an “herbal steam chamber.” (Okay … maybe the spa had a little to do with the whole “calling to me” thing.)

Mostly, though, I was motivated by the fact that the resort had a partnership with Cooper Wellness. Yeah, that Cooper Wellness, the Dallas company founded by the guy who — literally — invented aerobics. I could go to the chichi-est ski resort in Vermont and meet with Cooper’s fitness trainers and nutrition counselors and behavior coaches, who would evaluate where I was and where I wanted to be and thenwould write out a whole plan to direct me back to the person I was before I squeezed living things out of my body.  

Of course, I didn’t quite envision that a scale would be part of that plan. Or the drawing of several vials of blood. Or body-fat calipers. (Because no matter how you look at it, there is nothing über-luxurious about body-fat calipers.) But the wellness people at Stowe Mountain Lodge promise to “cultivate the relationship between living habits and health,” and if they could do that in this paradise, well … I could handle a little pinching and prodding. Especially when, in the end, my nutritionist simply reminded me of things I needed to hear — more fruit (eat half an orange as a snack midmorning), more veggies (add a salad to dinner), fewer handfuls of Goldfish throughout the day, and fewer slices of sausage pizza … even when all the time you carved out to cook that pork tenderloin with steamed broccoli was consumed by a two-and-a-half-year-old’s 30-minute meltdown over her mother’s inability to control when Dora the Explorer is on TV.