New connections can counter loneliness

By Harvard Health Blogs

Loneliness is complicated. You can feel lonely when you lack friends and miss companionship or when you’re surrounded by people — even friends and family.

Either way, loneliness can have devastating health effects. It boosts the risk of coronary artery disease, stroke, depression, high blood pressure, declining thinking skills, inability to perform daily living tasks, and even an early death.

The remedy?

Not all loneliness can be solved by seeking out people. The loneliness that occurs despite having plenty of relationships may require talk therapy and a journey that

Weight loss

From page 4 pounds, or about 15% of their initial body weight. Adolescents lost about 16% of their body weight.

A clinical trial of Mounjaro, which is still being studied, saw a mean weight loss of 15% to 21% of body weight, depending on the dose, compared with a weight loss of about 3% for people taking a placebo or dummy drug.

Why not just diet and exercise?

In a typical weight-loss program where participants rely only on diet and exercise, about a third of people enrolled will lose 5% or more of their body weight, noted Dr. Louis Aronne, director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Most people find it difficult to lose weight because of the body’s biological reactions to eating less, he said. There are several hormones that respond to reduced looks inward.

But reducing loneliness caused by a lack of relationships is more of an outward journey to make new friends. Below we offer three ways to ease loneliness and add happiness by helping you expand your social network.

“That’s a challenge as we get older because people are often established in their social groups and aren’t as available as they might have been in a different phase of life. So, you have to be more entrepreneurial and work harder to make friends than you once did,” said Dr. Jacqueline Olds, a psychiatrist at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital and the co-author of two books on loneliness. Trying these strategies can help: calorie intake to increase hunger and maintain body mass.

“There is a real physical phenomenon,” he said. “There is a resistance mechanism that is a coordinated effort by the body to prevent you from losing weight.”

What are the drugs’ side effects?

The most common side effects are short-lived gastrointestinal issues, such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pain and constipation.

Other possible side effects include thyroid tumors, cancer, inflammation of the pancreas, kidney and gallbladder, and eye problems. People with a family history of certain thyroid cancers or a rare genetic endocrine disorder should avoid the drugs.

What to watch out for

These new medications could be an effective part of a multifaceted approach to weight loss, said Dr. Amy Rothberg, a University of Michigan endocrinologist who directs a virtual weight management and