Are you on the Alcohol Diet? Do you drink on a regular basis? If so, are you also mindful of your weight, and the amount of exercise you get? Do you consider yourself fit and healthy? If so—does drinking seem to make it harder to lose weight? Are you able to develop muscles—but does it take longer when you’ve spent a few nights drinking beforehand? Do you feel flabby and misshapen, as hard as you work to become the complete opposite?

For many, at first, alcohol is a welcome friend, helping you to relax and take a load off after a long day. But alcohol is full of empty calories, and many seem to forget that it’s still a drug. And drinks can end up being pretty high in caloric content when you least expect it.

Okay, so maybe you’re not drinking a sugar-laden margarita every time you decide to drink, but the amount of drinks you have in an evening can inhibit metabolism, which means that whatever you’ve eaten will not be digested, because your body is forced to digest those empty calories from alcohol immediately, and you retain whatever you’ve eaten.

Drinking alcoholic beverages regularly is a good way to pack on the pounds. For a lot of people, it happens gradually over time. You don’t realize that you’ve been piling on 20 pounds worth of empty calories over the course of several years, and one day, there it is on the scale. You look a little closer, and you see that your skin is not as vibrant and your eyes not as bright as they used to be. It’s taken time, but alcohol has taken its toll.

A lot of people think that they can burn off those calories, but it’s not so simple. And what makes that process more difficult is the simple fact that cocktails stack up quickly. Let’s face it: most people do not stop after 1-2 drinks. It seems far more common to balance on the edge of 3 drinks, or more.

Stay tuned for the next few things that alcohol is capable of doing, that can ravage your body—and most importantly (to most anyway), your looks.