I Spend Four Hours Commuting Every Day. I’m Not the Only One Getting Heavier.

The National Nutrition Council says 4 out of 10 of us are now obese or overweight. I looked around the MRT last week and thought: yeah, that sounds about right.

The Thing Nobody Mentions About Traffic

I didn’t gain weight because I suddenly loved food more. I gained it because I started hating commuting so much that cooking felt like a second shift I couldn’t afford to clock into.

Here’s what a normal day looks like: leave the house at 6 AM to beat the worst of it. Spend two hours standing in a bus that smells like exhaust and someone’s fried tuyo. Arrive at work already exhausted. Leave at 6 PM. Do it all again in reverse. Get home at 8:30 PM, sometimes 9. By then, the idea of chopping vegetables feels like a personal attack. So I open a can of corned beef. Or I stop by Jollibee because it’s right there, it’s ₱120, and I don’t have to think.

The National Nutrition Council and the World Health Organization both say the same thing: obesity is more prevalent in urban cities. And I get it now. It’s not because we’re lazy. It’s because we’re tired in a way that makes instant noodles feel like self-care.

Walang Oras, Walang Laban

The math is simple, and it’s everywhere. If you spend four hours a day commuting, you lose four hours you could have used to cook, to move your body, to do anything that isn’t survival. And that’s if your commute is predictable. Most days it’s not. Most days it’s a car that broke down on EDSA, a bus that didn’t show up, a train so packed you’re holding your breath for twenty minutes straight.

So you get home and the last thing you want to do is stand over a stove. You want to sit down. You want to stop moving. And the food that’s fastest — instant pancit canton, canned sardines, a bag of chips while you wait for rice to cook — is also the food that’s cheapest and most accessible. It’s not a choice. It’s just what’s left after everything else takes from you.

I used to work out. Not a lot, but enough. A jog around the place, some YouTube workout video in the living room. But when you’re spending ten hours a day just getting to work and back, the idea of adding one more hour of effort feels impossible.

The Bigger Picture No One Wants to Talk About

The uncomfortable truth is that this isn’t a matter of willpower. It’s about infrastructure. It’s about an economy that pays us just enough to keep showing up but not enough to live well. It’s about a government that keeps saying they’ll fix traffic and then doesn’t, year after year, administration after administration.

Four out of ten Filipinos. That’s not a personal failing. That’s a policy failure.

And it’s not just about weight. It’s about time. It’s about the hours we lose to a system that doesn’t value our lives enough to make them livable. Every hour I spend in traffic is an hour I don’t spend cooking a real meal, moving my body, sleeping enough, seeing my family. It all adds up. Literally.

I think about the people I see on the commute — the ones carrying tupperware of rice and ulam they prepped the night before, the ones who still manage to pack a gym bag even though I don’t know when they’d have time to use it. I don’t know how they do it. Maybe they sleep less. Maybe they’ve just figured out a version of this life that I haven’t yet.

A BantayDaily personal essay by Juno dela Cruz.