I love breakfast. It's my favorite - and possibly largest - meal of the day. Every morning I start my day with a large bowl of cereal (maybe a little more), a toasted bagel with jam, and a cup of coffee to help me remember my name at 6 o'clock in the morning, which is surprising considering that the average teenager doesn't even eat the one meal that can help a person lose weight by consuming more. Either he or she doesn't have time in the morning, or stomachs haven't yet awakened by the time school starts.

Then comes lunch. If I don't pack anything I still have many options at my high school. I can cross the street and buy Ezell's fried chicken, walk a couple more blocks to the AM/PM gas station for those extremely healthy candy bars and sodas or to Dilettante's for coffee and sweets, head in the opposite direction to Starbuck's or The Magic Dragon (an Asian fast food joint), or buy strange, often unidentifiable concoctions from either the school vending machines, cafeteria, or student store. It also used to be popular at my school to take the metro bus down to Burger King, but that was before our lunch break was reduced to half an hour.

Now don't those options just excite everyone's inner health nut?

Blaming bad nutrition within schools and fast food joints for the increase in teenage weight has been a common outcry for a long time. For their part, schools have begun to respond remarkably well. At Garfield High School all vending machine items have to pass certain health requirements, soda has been replaced with water and milk machines (really yummy), and the cafeteria has attempted to fortify their menus with culturally diverse, healthy options. No matter that the "Vietnamese sandwiches" are pieces of dry bread with lettuce and tomatoes - meat on a good day - and the popcorn shrimp has the consistency of last week's breaded crab cakes. I will, on their behalf, state that cafeteria food is edible (then again, so is biodiesel).

Now it is no longer an issue with school food. Obviously it must be fast food, right? Wrong.

No person, teenager or otherwise, is being force-fed fried chicken, Coke, and Hershey bars every morning and afternoon. Every individual has a choice about what goes in his or her mouth. The problem is that this generation has terrible tastes in food.

I have friends who eat nothing but bags of chips, fried chicken or pre-popped popcorn for lunch everyday. It's disgusting! And the American public wonders why the national percentage of overweight and obese people is constantly increasing. There are three times as many obese teenagers now than they were in the 1970's. Not only do these eating habits encourage unhealthy weight gain in teenagers, but they also doom those whose young metabolisms can handle the onslaught now to obesity in adulthood.

I happen to have an unbelievable affinity for chocolate. During this Lenten season (a Christian holiday of temperament) I have chosen to give up all foods containing excess sugar. There are times when I would do just about anything for one of the truffles sitting on my family's kitchen counter, but the altering of my eating habits has managed to actually drop my weight by a couple of pounds.

Healthy eating can't be expected of teenagers who aren't used to eating healthy. Parents, this is a message for you (and we teenagers have to get on your case about this). Alter the foods available at home. It isn't possible to eat the correct foods if they aren't readily available for this generation, which seems to consider the microwave to be too slow. Ultimately, the choice is the teenager's, but a little nudge here and there never hurts.

Kyra-lin Hom can be reached at kl_hom@yahoo.com