It is discussed that optical beams propagate in non-local Kerr medium waveguides with losses. A variational principle is carried out for the 1+1-D non-local non-linear Schrödinger equation in the presence of the losses. In the strongly non-local case, the approximate analytical solutions are obtained. The lossy soliton solution shows that, Unlike its local counterpart, such lossy strongly non-local soliton does not possess the adiabatic property anymore. In addition, the general approximate results for non-soliton cases are gained. The comparisons between our approximate analytic solutions and numerical simulations confirm our variational approximate solutions.