Well Traveled: The Center for Health & Wellbeing Teaches Lifestyle Changes

The Center for Health & Wellbeing — the name makes it sound like it could be anywhere. But this is The Center for Health & Wellbeing at the Four Seasons Westlake Village. So while the name may be nondescript, the experience is unlike what you’ll find anywhere else.

I joined a cohort of seven people — from New York, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona and California — the first weekend of January to jump-start my new year and find out firsthand how a Four Seasons wellness retreat differed from others. We signed up for four days and three nights together and didn’t really know what we were in for. Our ages ranged from a recent college graduate to a retiree. (And don’t make assumptions — the retiree was a former athlete who out-hiked us all.) We met at The Center for Health & Wellbeing, a retreat center inside the Four Seasons Westlake Village hotel with its own kitchen, a patio with access to fresh herbs and vegetables, a yoga and meditation room, communal space and offices.

We arrived at the hotel, which is nestled between the Santa Monica Mountains and Malibu beaches in one of the most affluent communities in California, ready to push our bodies and our minds. Many, if not most, of us had attended other fitness retreats. But we soon discovered this wasn’t the kind of retreat where you extremely restrict calories, exercise all day, and drop pounds quickly — only to get home and wonder how to maintain your progress. Instead, the focus at The Center for Health & Wellbeing is on lifestyle changes and creating habits for longevity — habits that will last. 

Choose Your Adventure

After introductions and a warm-up outdoor yoga class, we cooked dinner together — with the help of the center’s chefs, who laid out ingredients for their recipes, mise en place. As we started chopping, we learned that food at the retreat would be healthy, but also flavorful and abundant. Cooking together and teaching each other new techniques — from emulsifying salad dressings to charring broccoli — would be a bonding exercise to last the weekend and beyond. “I really didn’t know how involved the program would be,” says Missy Funk, who signed up to spend the weekend with a friend who wanted to celebrate his birthday.

To get started, we selected one of three tracks: sustainable weight management, optimum performance, or spa and beauty. Then we completed questionnaires about our habits and goals and had a pre-retreat phone call to review it all. I’ve been working on increasing strength and recovering from a torn meniscus, so I chose optimum performance, which included VO2 max testing and consultations with trainers and nutritionists.

The all-inclusive retreat includes lectures, workshops and meals. There are group hikes in the Santa Monica Mountains, indoor and outdoor yoga classes, and group meditation sessions. There is also one-on-one programming based on each track. Experts include registered dietitians, clinical psychologists, sleep specialists, fitness trainers and more. 

Missy, who is no stranger to healthy eating or cooking, was pleasantly surprised by what she learned over the weekend, particularly at a dinner with Dr. Sam A. Kashani, a UCLA board-certified sleep medicine specialist. Missy has suffered from insomnia for years (globe-trotting and a work schedule that requires international travel really messes with your circadian rhythms), and having a conversation with an expert outside of a clinical environment helped her think about the problem differently.

After dinner, we went back to our rooms at the Four Seasons, which were made up for an optimum night’s sleep. There were no little red lights to distract us from getting shut-eye. Each room had blackout curtains, drawn during turn-down service. A copy of Marc Milstein’s book, The Age-Proof Brain: New Strategies to Improve Memory, Protect Immunity, and Fight Off Dementia was on the bed, opened to the sleep chapter. We also received some lavender spray to use on the sheets and a custom tea blend to sip before bed.

Step by Step

I found the approaches to nutrition and fitness similarly useful. The advice from Diane Grabowski-Nepa, a registered dietician, was easily adapted for grocery shopping back home. For example, instead of encouraging me to memorize formulas for calculating appropriate sodium content (which I know I won’t do), she offered a shortcut — determining if food is “too salty” (for someone with an average diet) if it has more than 1 milligram of sodium per calorie. I can do that math on the fly while browsing shelves at the Turnip Truck. The nutrition advice was focused on aging healthy, fighting disease, and working around personal limitations (such as dietary restrictions, preferences and time constraints), rather than fads.

Everyone in our group loved our breakfast talk from exercise physiologist Scott Silveira. He addressed the issue of loss of muscle mass, which can start as early as age 35, and encouraged us to look at exercise holistically, with its effect on the brain as well as the body. He offered advice on exercise frequency, intensity, length and styles, breaking down reps and number of sets for weightlifting. He shared how to add in exercise if you’ve been sedentary, or if you’ve only been doing cardio or strength and need to diversify.

The 12-acre property has gardens — with a waterfall — and I thought I’d be going on long walks there during our free time. But even as the certified introvert that I am, I found myself dining with my cohort for every single meal — and even hanging out in our private hot tub after the retreat ended. Missy and I appreciated the camaraderie of our cohort. We not only ate together, but we also stayed connected post-retreat through group texts and chats to support each other back home. 

We laughed our way through art therapy, learning to create without editing, and shared our diverse experiences and backgrounds, from training for downwind ocean paddle races (not me) to organizing our fridges so healthy foods are front-and-center (also not me).

Lightbulb Moments

The 308-room Four Seasons Westlake Village hotel is, of course, open to other guests and events, with its multiple restaurants, bars, pools and workout facilities available while the retreat is in session. And we weren’t relegated solely to the Center for Health & Wellbeing. We worked out in the gym, which is known for attracting high-profile celebrities as members. The hotel has three pools, each with a different vibe — fit for outdoor frolicking, sneaking privacy in a cabana, or lap swimming in a sunny, glass-ceiling-topped indoor pool. And I already mentioned the private hot tubs, which come with drink and meal delivery services.

At 40,000 square feet, the spa is the largest in the Four Seasons chain, with private treatment rooms, an orchid-filled lounge, a private relaxation spa, and large locker rooms with ample amenities. The spa offers traditional spa and salon services, plus acupuncture, hypnotherapy and body and posture work.

Once called the California Health & Longevity Institute (founded by David Murdock, former chairman of Dole Food Company), The Center for Health & Wellbeing uses the design and landscape of the resort wisely. We had our last dinner in the poolside greenhouse, enveloped by the fragrances of the herbs growing around us.

Our post-retreat follow-up included recipes used in the center’s kitchen during our stay, plus a copy of The Wellness Kitchen: Fresh, Flavorful Recipes for a Healthier You cookbook.

“Watching other people have their lightbulb moments was really gratifying,” Missy says. “We were complete strangers who left happier and healthier. Watching the journey of everyone was super uplifting.”