Canyon Ranch is a privately held healthy-lifestyle company that is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. Its staff includes dieticians, physicians, exercise physiologists and therapists. Canyon Ranch has resorts and spas in Arizona, Massachusetts, Nevada and Florida.
The founder of Canyon Ranch, Mel Zuckerman, always had poor health. Born an asthmatic, he was making multiple trips to the hospital by age 35 due to high blood pressure, ulcers, diverticulitis and a hernia. A doctor once told him that he had the body of a man about twice his age.
Determined to lose weight and live a healthier life, Zuckerman went to a "fat farm" in Ojai, California called the Oaks on New Year's Day, 1978, at age 50. For a month, he walked---then jogged---for miles. The Spartan lifestyle he experienced inspired him to change his lifestyle for good---and keep it that way. Moreover, Zuckerman wanted to share his inspiration for healthy living with others. He felt he had found his calling.
As a home builder by trade, Zuckerman, with the help of his wife, Enid, wanted to start a health spa in Tucson. A week and a half after leaving the Oaks, Zuckerman and his wife bought the Double-U Ranch in Tucson and built Canyon Ranch. The health spa opened its doors in December, 1979.
By the mid-1980s, Canyon Ranch was a popular healthy-lifestyle company, drawing a geographically diverse clientele. The Zuckermans noted that they were getting 60 percent of their business from guests flying in from the Northeast. Believing that people were becoming more conscious of fitness, the Zuckermans planned to expand their business, especially to that region.
In 1989, the Zuckermans picked the Bellefontaine Mansion in Lenox, Massachusetts for the site of their second resort. The Canyon Ranch in Lenox is characterized by its New England architectural style and classic vacation milieu.
More outposts followed: the Canyon Ranch Living at Miami Beach, Florida (it occupies two luxury condominiums) and the adjacent Canyon Ranch Hotel & Spa. The Zuckermans also founded three Canyon Ranch SpaClub day spas: in Las Vegas, Nevada; and aboard the ocean liner, the RMS Queen Mary 2, and three Oceania Cruises.
At age 65, Zuckerman went to a university to undergo a battery of tests. He wanted to find out the personal benefit of his business venture. The test revealed that he had the fitness of a 45- to 50-year old man, a reversal of the bad health he was in about three decades ago.
