Going on a Family Diet

There’s nothing like adversity to bring family members closer to each other—or to help them lose a little weight.
Early this year, our family hit financial rock-bottom. A new business that my mom put up as part of her semi-retirement program went down after only two months of operations—but not because the business itself failed. There was some in-fighting among business partners, and they one by one decided to withdraw support for the company, leaving our family even more broke than before. One line I had read in a business book years ago resurfaced in my mind: “Never invest more than you can afford to lose.”

Well, we pretty much lost everything.

Stuck with a mountain of bills to pay, no car, and just each other for support, our family trudged on. We all learned how to take the tricycle, jeep, and bus to where it was that we were going, and I had to keep up with the demands of my clients without a phone or Internet access at home. I frequented Internet cafes, used the neighborhood pay phone for business calls, and tried to maintain a tight work schedule to finish everything before the malls and shops closed. To help me meet my deadlines (as I had become the sole breadwinner since then), my mom and brother spent the most part of the summer running errands for me—delivering letters, collecting checks, and so on. We became a lean and mean working machine, trying to salvage what we could of the family’s dignity and pride.

The tight budget helped us all lose a few pounds, too.

Mom lost the most—nine pounds—after a couple of months on a pretty lean diet: two pieces of toast and coffee for breakfast, vegetables and rice for lunch, and less than the usual amount of food (usually fish or pork) for dinner. I lost a few, too, but the stress and workload also kept me on a Coke-and-Nagaraya diet, offsetting whatever weight I would have lost because of the penny-pinching.

Some days, we would run on just P20 of cash, so I would ask the helper to buy kangkong and carrots from the neighborhood vegetable stall (for only P10!). Although I enjoyed the kangkong-and-carrot combination immensely, those instances made me feel really kawawa (pitiful), and made me question God. Don’t I deserve more than this?, I would find myself saying.

I would find God’s reply in the nightly after-dinner talks that my mom, brother, and I would have on the patio.

“Isn’t it amazing how much closer we’ve grown through this experience?”, Mom would often ask in amusement. We had been fighting for almost two years straight before this crisis hit us, but now we can’t really think of anything else than how to support each other through the tough times.

“And isn’t it amazing how much you’ve mellowed, Mom?”, my brother would follow up in jest. Mom had been notorious—since the dawn of time—for her “hyper-frankness” (tactlessness, more like it) and wild temper, and the people at Philippine Airlines had even given her the monicker “Mrs. Terror”. Yes, the crisis—and the golden years—have softened her tremendously. She hardly shouts or throws temper tantrums anymore.

This whole experience has softened me, too. It has made me less critical of my family’s mistakes, and more appreciative of their unflinching support. It has enabled me to re-establish my role as Mom’s Little Helper and my brother’s Big Sister, and it has also pushed me to work harder—with God pulling me up from above, of course.

(Really, there’s nothing like an external driving force, or a nightmare scenario, to motivate oneself.)

Even my relationship with Paul has strengthened through this experience, as he saw another side of me emerge. If he used to think of me as a naïve little girl that needed babysitting and protection, now he sees that I’m made of tougher stuff. He has seen me become a loyal and dutiful daughter, a tough and feisty woman—someone whom Life and adversity can’t put down that easily. He, too, has supported me with a lot of love, patience, understanding, and humor to ensure that I succeed in what I do and support my family.

(I blush when my mom calls him “My Son”, but I think it says a lot about how our family and the relationships among us have changed in recent months.)

Fitness experts were right in saying that group exercise does increase one’s motivation and ability to stick to a fitness program. Well, I’m treating this as God’s fitness program for our family—something to trim the fat and beef up the muscle. You should try it sometime. I think it works wonders.

(Written: July 3, 2004)