Drinking wine every night: what it does and how to handle it.

It's seven, you shut the laptop and open a bottle. For many business owners and managers, drinking wine every night is how the day ends, with a large glass while cooking and another over dinner.

'It's only a glass,' I often hear. Add the pub after work on Thursday and dinner out on Saturday. Over a week, those glasses are a standing order.

How to tell it's become a habit

• You pour it without thinking. Before deciding whether you want it.
• It arrives before the food. Cooking or at the bar, on an empty stomach.
• You're flat the next morning. You got your hours and woke up tired.
• The scales jump about. Alcohol makes you lose water, then your body grabs it back.

Does drinking wine every night make you put on weight?

It can, yes. A gram of alcohol carries 7 calories, almost double a gram of sugar, and a nightly glass often nudges fat towards your middle.

They're empty calories. A small glass is around a hundred calories and doesn't feed you. One a night is about seven hundred a week you don't remember eating.

It can raise cortisol. That's the stress hormone, which tends to send fat to your waist. You drink to relax and leave on the thing you wanted off.

It shifts your hormones. Alcohol drives the enzyme that turns testosterone into oestrogen. In men that can mean less tone and more fat round the middle. In women it touches an already delicate balance, and women generally tolerate about half what men do.

It sets up tomorrow's hunger. Alcohol knocks you out sooner, then breaks up the second half of the night, the dreaming half. After a broken night your hunger hormone tends to rise and your fullness hormone to drop. You want bread and sweet things, and willpower has little to do with it. You usually recover less well too, and a watch that tracks it will show you.

How to handle it without living like a monk

Choose your nights. Monday to Friday, no alcohol. On Sunday, pick the week's one or two occasions, say Saturday dinner. You'll enjoy them more.

At the table, after the first few mouthfuls. A glass of wine with dinner, once the food arrives. With food in your stomach, alcohol hits more slowly.

At the pub, proper food first. Order something to eat, then the pint. It takes the place of the crisps. Order water too.

Give your evening a different signal. That glass is how you switch off. Take it away with nothing in its place and it comes back. Before the kitchen, shut the laptop, get changed, take a short walk. With the day already closed, a drink is a choice again.

The morning after, start with breakfast. After a long dinner you'll want something sweet. Have a savoury breakfast of eggs, Greek yoghurt and nuts, and eat at your usual times. Skip the scales for two days. That number is mostly water.

Start with one thing, choosing your nights, and keep it up for two weeks. Then notice how you wake up and how hungry you are mid-morning.