Too much alcohol is bad for you and by too much, we mean more than the recommended upper limits. That’s about 14 units a week for men and women, spread over several days and with at least a couple of alcohol-free days per week.

One of the many bits of your body that will suffer if you drink too much alcohol is your liver because your liver is the organ that has to process the toxins, the poison that alcohol is. There are three stages of liver disease related to alcohol and they can interestingly occur at the same time to an extent.

The first is what’s called fatty liver. So you may feel fine, you may not have any symptoms but fat is building up inside your liver, stopping it from working so efficiently. The next stage is hepatitis or inflammation of your liver and the third stage is cirrhosis where the affected person gets severe permanent scarring of the liver.

Both of those can cause symptoms that can be very similar. An affected person might feel tired, sick, or have pain in the top right side of the stomach. Especially towards the cirrhosis stage, the person can get jaundice which involves yellowing of the skin particularly the whites of the eyes.

The person may bleed more easily, get bruises underneath the skin, and lose weight, men may gain breasts while the testicles can shrink. All of these things can happen either together or one after another and many of those symptoms can occur at the same time.

Now in the early stages, the liver is amazingly good at recovering, and just stopping drinking may be enough. Later on, the treatment will depend on what the main symptoms are. However, make no mistake, if you don’t take action to reduce your alcohol intake when you get those early warning signs. It’s a one-way ticket to very bad news indeed.