Any plan that requires you to stop going to the pub, skip the curry and eat differently from everyone at the table is not a plan. It is a temporary arrangement, and you already know how those end.

You are going to eat out. You are going to have a drink. The question is only whether that fits inside what you are doing or blows it up every Friday.

The arithmetic that makes this manageable

Three meals out a fortnight is roughly seven per cent of your meals. If the other ninety-three per cent are decent, those seven can be more or less whatever you like and your waist will still move.

The damage is almost never the meal. It is the pattern around it: the write-off that starts at Friday lunchtime and runs to Sunday night, and the Monday restart that never quite happens. One big meal is a Saturday. A weekend written off is forty per cent of your week.

At the pub

Alcohol is worth understanding rather than moralising about. It is calorie-dense, it is easy to drink without noticing, it makes you hungrier and less fussy about what you eat, and it wrecks the quality of your sleep even when you fall asleep quickly. That last one is the part most men have never connected to how they feel on a Sunday.

• Decide the number before you go in, not at the bar. Two is a decision. Whatever happens is not.
• Alternate. A pint, a soft drink, a pint. You will drink about a third less without noticing and you will sleep better.
• Eat before you drink. Especially something with protein in it. Arriving hungry is how three pints becomes three pints and a bag of nuts and a kebab.
• Know what you are actually drinking. A few pints of ordinary lager is a decent-sized meal. Nobody is telling you not to. It just helps to know it is a meal.

At a restaurant

None of this is about ordering a salad and sitting there resenting everybody.

• Choose the protein first. Steak, chicken, fish, lamb, whatever you fancy. Build the rest of the plate around it and you will be full on less.
• Pick your one. Starter, side of chips, pudding, or the third drink. One of those, not all four. That single decision is most of the difference.
• Have the thing you actually came for. A man who orders the plain option and then eats biscuits at home at eleven has not gained anything.
• Slow down. Being the last to finish is a genuinely effective trick and it costs nothing.

Weddings, holidays and Christmas

Do not try to run a deficit through these. It rarely works, it makes you miserable, and it makes other people uncomfortable, which is its own kind of cost.

Aim to hold steady instead. Keep the walking, keep one strength session in the week if you can, eat properly at breakfast, and let the rest be what it is. A fortnight of holding steady costs you a fortnight. A fortnight that ends with you deciding you have ruined it costs you months, and that is the difference that actually matters.

The morning after

There is only one rule and it is the same one that governs everything else here: the next meal is normal. Not a punishment breakfast, not skipping lunch to make up for it, not a two-hour session to burn it off.

The men who stay in shape after 50 are not the ones who never have a big night. They are the ones for whom a big night is simply Saturday, and Sunday lunch is ordinary again.

What to do this week

• Before your next meal out, decide your one. Starter, chips, pudding or the extra drink.
• Alternate your drinks once and notice how you feel the next morning.
• Eat something with protein in it before you go out.
• Whatever happens, make the next meal a normal one. No compensating.

Alex Jordan · Over 50 and Healthy