New Weight Loss Drug

There might be new hope in the weight loss battle that's both safe and effective.

We've heard this promise so often that it's hard not to turn a deaf ear, but this time, researchers might have found a diet pill that both works and doesn't seem to have a lot of side effects. It's called Contrave.

One thing that separates this from other diet pills is that it's actually a combination of two different medications, naltrexone and buproprion, both medications that have been around for a few years. Naltraxone is used normally used to treat addictions, like smoking, and buproprion, which goes by the brand name wellbutrin, treats depression. But by combining these two medications into one pill, researchers have found a treatment that helped participants in a clinical trial lose, on the average, 6.1 percent of their body fat in one year. Researchers involved in the study thinks this pill is effective because the two drugs target different brain areas important to weight loss at the same time.

Although there were some side effects, including nausea, headache and dizziness, researchers said there were no signs of the depression or suicidal thoughts that came with other weight loss pills.

This medication is still in clinical trial but if results pan out, it could help shed some of those unwanted pounds in the near future.