Psst. Wanna’ gain 15-plus pounds over the next few months? Here are some sure-fire ways to pile on the pounds.

• Eat lots of processed and/or food prepared outside your home.
  
  
• Don’t  keep track of all the sugar you’re consuming. Instead, read nutrition labels (especially total carb count) – and much more importantly – ingredient lists where marketers have a field day deceiving us about how much added sugars there are by dividing them into various sources: Agave nectar, barley malt syrup, beet sugar, brown rice syrup, brown sugar cane crystals, cane sugar, coconut sugar or coconut palm sugar, corn sweetener corn syrup or corn syrup solids, dehydrated cane juice, dextrin, dextrose, evaporated cane juice, fructose, fruit juice concentrate, glucose, high-fructose corn syrup, honey, invert sugar, lactose, maltodextrin, malt syrup, maltose, maple syrup, molasses, palm sugar, raw sugar, rice syrup, saccharose, sorghum or sorghum syrup, sucrose, turbinado sugar, xylose. Remember, your body doesn't care what the label says, it's all just sugar!

For example, an 8-ounce serving of the average fruit variety non-fat yogurt might contain a staggering 47 grams of sugar (11 teaspoons)! Grilling a hamburger? Mixing up a batch of Grandma’s potato salad? Prepare for a sugar bomb. Ketchup, barbecue sauce, mayonnaise, steak sauces, salad dressing and, yes, even mustard all contain sugar. Some styles of BBQ sauce contain 13 grams of sugar (approximately 3 teaspoons) for every two tablespoons of condiment!

Head for the cereal bowl for a “traditional” breakfast. You already know that Fruit Loops, Cocoa Puffs and other childhood favorites carry too much sugar. According to www.nextavenue.org,  a PBS website for the over-50 set, Kellogg’s Smart Start Strong Heart Toasted Oat Cereal comes complete with nine types of sugar, including corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, molasses, honey and sugar. Add them all up, and the cereal carries 5 more grams of sugar per serving than Fruit Loops. Post Great Grains Cranberry Almond Crunch provides all of its promised whole grain — with exactly the same amount of sugar per serving as Fruit Loops. Similar scenarios can be found on nutrition labels up and down the cereal aisle; high-fiber and bran varieties are among the worst offenders.

• Embrace low-fat anything. Food processors have added sugar and other carbs to replace the mouth-feel, taste, and satisfaction you’d have enjoyed before they took the fat out. They’ll not only pack in a whole lot more calories (if you’re counting those), but sugar content will soar. For example: an 8-oz. serving of plain, whole-milk yogurt has 149 calories; fat-free drops to 137; low-fat grows to 154 and low-fat with fruit soars to 238!

The horrible examples could go on for more pages than there are column inches in this publication. Instead, here’s a small, but weighty (15-1/2 good pounds), list of cookbooks I think you will enjoy and greatly expand your food knowledge instead of your waistline. (Even though it seems cookbooks have followed the trend toward increasing obesity in humans, at least with these you’ll gain fascinating ideas not calories or harmful carbs – and you could at least benefit from using them as weight-training exercise aids lugging them around from library or bookstore to reading chair to kitchen.)

• Wellness Foods A to Z, Sheldon Margen, M.D., University of California, Berkeley, Wellness Letter, Rebus, Inc. 2012. A comprehensive compendium of health; nutrition; and shopping, storage and serving suggestions for practically everything edible on the planet. 640 pages.   
    
• Splendid Soups: Recipes and Master Techniques for Making the World’s Best Soups, by James Peterson, Bantam Books, 1993 (an oldie but real goodie). Name an ingredient – meat, fish, veggie, fruit, grain, legume, dairy product or anything else you might fancy or have on hand – and Peterson will help you turn it into a fantastic soup. 524 pages.
  
  
• Meat: Everything You Need to Know, by Pat LaFrieda and Carolynn Carreno, Atria Books, 2014. Whether you’re a dedicated carnivore, or someone who savors meat only occasionally, there is much to learn no matter how long you’ve been eating meat, or even if you grew up raising animals for consumption. The more you know, the more you’ll enjoy. 234 pages.
  
  
• The Vegetarian Flavor Bible, Karen Page, Little, Brown, 2014. If you’re at the other end of the eating spectrum – favoring plant-based foods over animal parts – or just want to make what have become the same old, same old veggie dishes, this lofty guide takes you through herbs, spices and other seasonings to best enhance the flavor of everything from acai to zucchini. 554 pages.
  
  
• In a Nutshell: Cooking and Baking with Nuts and Seeds. Cara Tannenbaum and Andrea Tutunjian. W.W. Norton and Company, 2014. Extraordinary recipes to bring smooth, crunchy, savory and sweet nutrients to every snack, meal or dessert. 384 pages.

Allison St. Claire loves to dream about, study, grow, play with, prepare and ultimately enjoy eating great food.

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