BUILDING FROM LOSS
Mother’s death prompts three brothers to drop 100 pounds each and start a business
Abraham Peña changed his life in hopes of saving his mother’s. Amid family dysfunction, he had tipped past 300 pounds and needed to make changes. It took a familial crisis and his mother’s failing health to put him on a different path.
He gets choked up talking about his mother, Lourdes, who died in the summer of 2015.
“I’m sorry, man,” he says, pausing a moment. “Obviously growing up, she was our mom, you love your mom. But when her health was getting worse, all these bad things happening, it brought me closer to her. It took me to where I am now.”
These days, Peña, 35, creates some 300 to 400 prepared meals a week for Abe’s Fitty Foods, a company that after a few fitful starts finally found its footing as Peña studied food preparation, from working at burger joints to working the stove at home under his mother’s guidance.
His turnaround created a vortex that swept up his brothers Rodolfo, 24, and Gustavo, 27.
“We’ve all taken different paths to get here,” he says of the sibling trio. Each of the three has dropped more than 100
pounds through exercise and diet. “And that’s the way it’s supposed to be. You do it when you’re ready to start doing it.”
About two years ago, Peña started powerlifting. He was already a regular at Texas Elite Fitness on Telephone Road, where he and the gym’s owner connected over their health turnarounds after the passing of parents.
“I’m not an angry guy, but still, sometimes the anger and depression, those things, they come back,” he says. “Powerlifting helped me deal with those emotions. I got everything out.
“Hey, there have been days I wanted to quit. But obviously, I’d hear my mom urging me to keep going. It’s been a pretty long journey.”
Eight years ago, the brothers’ parents split. Their father left, and they stayed with their mother “because she was our mom, and she was an amazing person,” Peña says. “Obviously it was going to be Mom.”
Her health wasn’t great, though, and she found herself on dialysis.
“With all that was happening, she still pushed us,” Peña says. “I was the older one. So it was, ‘What are you going to do?’ I was always between jobs. So she said, ‘Fine, help me cook.’
“But I didn’t know how to cook.”
So Peña became her cooking student. His mother began to teach him what she knew. And he also worked jobs at a few burger joints, where he studied marketing and promotion as well as what went into the food. For his mother, he needed to decrease her sodium intake, so he tried some basic foods first: a turkey wrap with greens and brown rice.
“From there, we got a little more lively,” he says. “But it was a constant study: take this out, put this in. More of this, less of this. Check the nutritional information. What can you do to get the same flavor with less salt? How do we get away from gorditas or tacos. It all started to hit me over the head, learning about macronutrients. What are the best ingredients to include over the long run?”
The first attempt to launch Abe’s Fitty Foods six years ago didn’t work. A second attempt a year later also ground to a halt. The family struggled terribly in 2015 and 2016: Peña says they found out their father sold their home and headed to Mexico with the money. And then Lourdes suffered a heart attack in May 2015 and died. They had no home and no family other than themselves.
“For a year, we battled depression, we didn’t know where we were going to live,” Peña says. He gathers his thoughts, a pause that spans a good 20 seconds. “That was another low point.” But at that moment, Peña resolved to find a solution to their struggles. He was down 90 pounds, thanks to changing his diet and adding exercise. Youngest brother Rodolfo, “Rudy,” was on board at that point, too, working out and eating better.
“Gus took a little longer, but recently he got past 100 pounds lost,” Peña says. “But this is a journey Mom put us on.”
A friend offered them a place to stay. And Peña relaunched Abe’s Fitty Foods a third time in early 2017 on the back of a Go Fund Me campaign. Early on, orders were light: about 50 meals a month. Over three years, the business grew to where Peña makes a few hundred meals each week. He says orders are down during the pandemic. But his business appears to have found a sustainable base of customers.
And each of the three brothers has dropped more than 100 pounds at this point. They allowed one indulgent day each year.
“Mother’s Day always gets to me,” Peña says. “It never fails. It happens each year, but I think about how after my dad left my mom, she didn’t give up. So that day is difficult. But then we keep pushing. I’m doing what I love and I’m taking my brothers with me.”
“Hey, there have been days I wanted to quit. But obviously, I’d hear my mom urging me to keep going.”
Abraham Peña, founder of Abe’s Fitty Foods