Week #8 of My Liquid Diet: Urge Surfing

Lessons from riding the waves.

Josh Kornbluth

Sep 10, 2023

Stations of the Loss:

Beginning weight (July 14): 230 lbs.
Weight at start of Week #2: 222
Weight at start of Week #3: 218.4
Weight at start of Week #4: 215.3
Weight at start of Week #5: 215.1
Weight at start of Week #6: 211.2
Weight at start of Week #7: 208.1
Weight at start of Week #8: 204.3
Weight at Start of Week #9 (current week): 201.9

Total weight loss so far: 28.1 lbs.

Twenty-two weeks to go.

We are learning about “urge surfing” this week in my dieting cohort. It’s a technique for riding each wave of craving — for food, in our case, though it can evidently be applied to many kinds of addictions — and letting that wave dissipate, rather than fighting it. Fighting it, we are warned, may end up pulling us down into the depths of our craving, where we could drown in Hollandaise sauce and self-hatred.

The cravings tend to hit me several times each day (“My kingdom for an eggs Benedict!”) and usually pass in less than a minute. Curiously, I’ve been finding that they act like sugar-free versions of Proust’s madeleine: they sweep me back into my memories, especially of things, and people, that I’ve lost.

When I was in third grade, I became friends with Casey Eastman (I’ve changed his name). Casey was a grade ahead of me, but despite that daunting age gap we connected somehow. I ended up having many sleepovers at his apartment, which was in a very nice building in a tony section of West End Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His parents — both psychologists, as I recall — were much better off than mine.

This was my first-ever immersive friendship. Casey and I shared imaginative worlds — we spent hours and hours in his room playing with G.I. Joe dolls and other toys, co-creating elaborate magical adventures. We also had a band together: Casey played guitar and I played autoharp, though sometimes I switched to violin (yeah, we were rock-’n’-roll badasses). My playtimes with Casey were my first experiences of feeling totally happy that didn’t involve being with my father. Coming home from my sleepovers at Casey’s place felt like waking from a blissful dream — with the promise of another one the next time I went over there.

We were friends during that whole school year — and then, as summer vacation approached, Casey told me that he and his parents were going to be spending it at their vacation home on Block Island, in the exotic state of Rhode Island (to me, anyplace outside of Manhattan was exotic). I can’t remember whether Casey himself invited me and my family to visit them there, or if it was his parents who mentioned it — an important distinction, as it would turn out. In any case, sometime that summer my father, Paul, my stepmother, Sue (they’d gotten married that year), and I went out to stay with them for a long weekend.

In retrospect, I’m not sure the Eastmans were expecting us. I have a mental snapshot of Casey’s father standing in a darkened hallway in his shorts and sandals, just kind of staring at Dad and Sue and me as we said our hellos from their front porch. Oh, I was so excited! My magical friendship with Casey was now expanding to include both of our families. But perhaps to Casey’s parents, it felt as if their island paradise was being invaded. Still, they took us in.

The beach on Block Island (there are many) that they brought us to was a revelation to me. To that point, I was mostly used to going to Jones Beach. This was the big hot-weather getaway for a huge number of working-class New Yorkers. Despite the sand and the waves, it could feel more like a teeming metropolis than a beach. There were just so many people packed together: the mass of gleaming humanity seemed to stretch for miles!

The beach on Block Island was a whole different vibe — this was, after all, a resort community. Way fewer people. And cleaner. And the waves felt so much friendlier, somehow. Until Block Island, I’d never had the experience of being lifted up by waves, over and over. (Like real New Yorkers, the waves at Jones Beach were much more likely to try to knock you over.) You could just stand there, in the sparkling saltwater, and pretty soon another wave would come along and gently pick you up until your toes were no longer touching the bottom — and hold you there, for a time, before setting you back down. It was absolute bliss!

Dad, Sue, and I had a lovely time on Block Island, and I thought the Eastmans had enjoyed our visit with them as well. But afterwards, Casey stopped returning my calls. And when school started again, he wouldn’t talk to me there either. In fact, he never spoke to me again. (Once, at a science presentation attended by both my fourth-grade class and his fifth-grade class, I held up a handwritten sign that said, “Casey, Why Don’t You Like Me Anymore?” He didn’t answer.)

I was devastated by Casey’s unfriending of me. I kept going over and over things in my head, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Was our one-year age difference now a bigger deal than it had been? Did he now find it embarrassing that we had so enjoyed playing with dolls and toys? At some point, it occurred to me that it may have had something to do with my family’s visit to Block Island. Did the loud, folk-singing, joyfully cursing Kornbluths come off as crude to the more refined, upper-class Eastmans? Did we embarrass them in front of their WASPy vacationing friends?

And then, this past week, as I surfed a food craving, I was struck by another thought: Was it because we were fat?

Dad, Sue, and I were all very heavy. And there we were, on that chichi beach, splashing around happily in our big, gaudy swimsuits. The Eastmans were trim and tasteful.

Maybe I’m totally off-base here. Maybe what put them off was the totality of what we were, not just our being overweight. Or perhaps Casey’s break from me had nothing at all to do with our parents, or with my family’s visit to Block Island. I mean, kids stop being friends with each other all the time, right? Heck, grownups do it, too!

In any case, it strikes me now that one cool thing about dieting is that you are seeking to be in control of what you lose. To master the pain. To greet longing with mindfulness. To feel, despite all the heaviness that remains, still buoyant somehow, uplifted.