You may think during the holidays that just a little extra turkey, or stuffing, or whatever it is you eat during the holidays (my family’s Christmas eve dinner was all Mexican food, of course) won’t hurt too much, cause you’ll start dieting in the new year (how’s that resolution working, by the way?). But studies show that overeating at some meals can actually lead to long-term damage to your health.

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition reports that sporadic overeating can lead to more than that, with detrimental effects.

The problem, some doctors and researchers say, is that overeating causes biological changes in the body that can lead more food cravings and cause your stomach to send mixed signals about when it’s actually full. As the years go by, those holiday pounds add up.

So, basically, that little extra you had just because it was New Year’s Eve or whatever will come back to haunt you in the coming years. The biological changes make you more likely to overeat instead of sleep, for example (which seems odd, I know, but we don’t argue with science). Not only that, but the sum of constant overeating ends up causing  more damage than the individual parts would have you believe (does that sentence make sense when I split up the phrase “sum is greater than the parts”? That’s what we’re going for here):

Overeating ’sets your body chemistry sort of into red alert,’ says Dr. Sasha Stiles, a family physician who specializes in obesity at Tufts Medical Center. ‘The kinds of hormone and metabolic processes that normally will try to metabolize food will go into overdrive to make sure they get rid of this huge food load,’ Stiles explains. This means that much of what you eat will be stored as fat rather than converted into healthy byproducts.

The moral? Holidays, it seems, are no time to binge just because it’s the holidays, becuase the repurcussions last long beyond the last week in December. To mitigate all this takepart  with WikiHow to learn how to eat healthy.