KEY POINTS:
I had just brought home a pack of KFC for dinner when the 17-year-old girl who boards at our home exclaimed that it was the end of the world.
Mel was faced with a great teenage dilemma. She'd put on 5kg since she moved to New Zealand last August and did not know how she would face her family and friends when she went back to Shanghai for the school holidays.
Mel is definitely not alone in this bulging problem. It seems that even with the Government's bizarre plan to curb immigration numbers, the New Zealand Asian size will still be on the increase.
A report released last week has found young Asian New Zealanders are getting bigger around the waist, and warned that Asian adolescents were an obesity timebomb.
Auckland University researcher Shirin Foroughian, who did the study, told public health delegates at a conference last week that New Zealand may become a nation of overweight Asians.
If it was not nipped in the bud, the problem could reach the same scale as Maori and Pacific people face.
The study found that Asian youth are clueless when it comes to understanding healthy food and lifestyles.
Many did not know that watching a lot of television can lead to weight gain, or that fruit juices and cordials can contain more sugar than other non-diet drinks.
I guess, like Mel, going on a diet for many of them means cutting down on quantity but not the type of food they eat, and they don't distinguish grilled fish from deep-fried battered fish.
Foroughian feels the answer is to give young Asians better access to information about food and health.
"We need parents and families and schools to be involved with intervention. Parents need to support their young people's desire to maintain a healthy lifestyle," she said.
That's easier said than done. If we do a reality check, you will find that many of these young Asians don't have their parents around.
Take Mel, for example. After her parents got their New Zealand residency, she stayed here for her high-school education while mum and dad went back to China to work.
The research also found young Asians had unhealthy diets. In school, more of them were getting lunch from the canteen rather than packing their own lunches, and outside school, they were eating more fried food and takeaways, and snacking on potato chips, pies and biscuits.
Given the Asians' love of food, this finding is not surprising. It is almost an Asian culture to live to eat - we eat often, eat together and find every reason to eat to celebrate, whatever the occasion.
Like the binge-drinking problem we have with young European New Zealanders, it would be just as hard to curb binge eating among young Asians.
Targeting school canteens and getting them to outlaw lollies and fizzy drinks will just prove futile. Those who want them will get them from the dairy next door once the schoolbell rings.
But the real problem is not about food intake, but rather food intake with little or no output. Since moving to New Zealand, Mel's physical activities have been limited to walking to school and back.
Her friend's idea of extreme sports is playing Need for Speed on PlayStation, or finger Olympics on the cellphone.
Probably even greater than their love of food is the Asian students' love of the cellphone, computer and their handheld video gaming machines.
I also think Foroughian's call for schools to organise sports for students during breaks and lunchtime is right. She suggested that schools should teach health as a compulsory subject, but I say the same should also be made for physical education.
Since discovering PE is not a compulsory subject, my 15-year-old Singaporean nephew, who is a Year 11 high-school student here, dropped PE so he could spend more time on his computer.
I remember my own school days in Singapore, where the canteen's unhealthy food - greasy fried food and sugar-filled syrup drinks - was the highlight of my school days. Since then neither my friends nor I have any problems with obesity.
Perhaps what worked was physical education as a compulsory subject and the annual physical fitness test we all had to take. Failure meant hours of training after school and re-testing until we passed.
Why not introduce such a programme for New Zealand schools? The cost would be minimal compared with the price we would have to pay in health cost for not doing it.
