Stop Abusing Your Body With Alcohol

If you are drinking heavily or more than you really should bearing in mind your age, sex and level of fitness then you could be doing long-term irreparable damage to your body.

The two main areas of your body which are affected by excessive alcohol consumption are the liver and the kidneys. Let’s have a look and see exactly what alcohol is doing to these parts of your body.

What The Liver Does:
The liver eliminates 90% of alcohol in the body, 10% is excreted through urine and the breath. The liver can only deal with one standard drink in an hour. So, the alcohol in one pint of ordinary strength lager will take two hours to pass out of your body. The excess alcohol affects the brain, heart, muscles, and other tissues of the body.

Short-Term Problems:
When the liver is breaking down alcohol it produces acetaldehyde, a substance which has toxic effects on your liver, brain and stomach lining, resulting in headache, nausea, vomiting and heartburn.

Also the liver needs water to do its work but alcohol is a diuretic meaning it removes water. So the liver has to divert water away from other organs including the brain making you feel worse and further dehydrated.

Long-term Damage To Liver:
Cirrhosis of the Liver, Alcoholic Hepatitis, Fatty Deposits in Liver

Effects on the Kidneys:
Alcohol can have major impacts on the kidneys. The main ways are from causing cell damage and enlarging the kidneys to impacting the various hormones that control kidney function. Alcohol causes an ionic imbalance in the body that can affect many metabolic processes.

Skin:
Because alcohol dehydrates your body and skin, this causes redness of the skin and makes it appear blotchy. This is particularly more marked with women as their skin is thinner than men’s so the effects are more marked.

Brain:
In large amounts, alcohol interferes with some of the chemical messages in your brain. It dramatically reduces your ability to learn and form memories, which is why people experience "blackouts”. Long-term heavy drinking can lead to problems in learning new skills.

This information was provided to me by Rahul Nag, the owner of the website Alcohol Free Social Life He is a former problem drinker who managed to stop drinking when he realised he was becoming addicted and dependent on alcohol as a means of stress reduction and for feeling good and relaxed. He was worried about the potential long-term effects of drinking.

Please visit his site for more information on the long-term effects of drinking and how to make changes in your life with drinking: Alcohol Free Social Life