The Current - She had anorexia as a teenager. She wants you to know it's more complicated than you might think

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Eisha Marjara's documentary "Am I The Skinniest Person You've Ever Seen?" examines her desire to halt her transition into womanhood and the complex ties in her immigrant family. She hopes doing so will help others feel less alone.

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This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. The first few seconds of Isha Marjara's documentary are stark. She stands silently facing a video camera. She's wearing a bikini that hangs off her skeletal frame, and then she explains what we're seeing. I'm 18, and I'm dragged from school to the hospital. And I made to look at myself.

I weigh 56 pounds. Do you find you're too skinny? Yes, I am too skinny, but what does it matter? She may not have understood why it mattered back then decades ago, but she does now. The Montreal filmmakers document. Am I the skinniest person you have ever seen, delves into the reasons behind her teenage eating disorder, and they're not as clear cut as you might think. It began when she and her sister decided to go on a diet together.

Her sister stopped. She kept going, and her motivations were tangled up with her feelings about adulthood, her family, and much more. Isha Marjara joins us now. Isha, good morning. Good morning. Go back to that moment in the hospital. Why were you there being forced to watch a video of yourself at 56 pounds? I think the idea was to have the patients coming in, look at their bodies objectively,

and kind of come out of their own body dysmorphia and recognize the pattern and the illness. But I was kind of already past that stage. I knew I was skinny. I knew what they were trying to do. So, you know, I was a bit jaded at that point. You know, I kind of saw past what they were trying to do. How would you describe that point that you were at? I mean, where you were at that moment?

At that moment, it was a split feeling. A part of me was relieved because the pressure of having to sustain that kind of way of life, just rigorous physical activity because I was a teenager I was just going to school every day and eating very very little and it was really taxing on the body so part of me was relieved that somebody could just force me into stopping that because I wasn't able to do it and the other part of me was like I am not going to submit you can't make me there's no way you're going to take this away from me so there was really a hardened kind of will to continue on this path there's a point in the documentary in which you ask the doctor and this is the title of the film am i the skinniest person

you've ever seen what does the doctor say he says no he's seen skinnier people and uh i sort of chuckle and say oh shucks there was a sense of pride in having to be you you know, wanting to be skinny and the skinniest one. I think it's not an uncommon thing amongst people who've had anorexia, that there's a kind of pride and sense of superiority about being able to have that sort of control. And that's where I was at. As I mentioned, this film is about where you were in that moment, but also some of the reasons that you ended up developing this eating disorder.

Tell me a little bit about your family, your mom and your dad moved to Quebec from India. You had an older sister, Amita, a younger sister, Seema. Tell me a little bit about your family. What was it like? Well, we grew up in T'O Rivier. My father was teaching at the university, and I had a pretty great childhood, and then puberty hit. And that was a difficult transition that I wasn't prepared for. I just saw a future that was pretty scary to me

and I could see that my peers were excited about growing up and becoming women and dating and all of that and I was really not into that at all. And I was still busy being a kid and I saw these changes taking place in my body and I saw how people were starting to look at me in a kind of sexual way and that was not comfortable.

I didn't like the female body. I didn't feel ready to accept those changes. It was accelerating at a speed that I wasn't able to control. And, you know, in a way, the idea of choosing is problematic to me because it's not like someone chooses to be anorexic. It just seemed like the perfect thing. I remember in high school, my teacher, he spoke about anorexia, and he said, you know, there's this thing called anorexia and girls kind of lose weight. And I said, wow, that's amazing. I'd like to be that. You know, just that like thought popped into my head. And I never remembered it again. And then when it really presented itself accidentally in the diet I had with my little sister, it was like, oh my God, It was like, I just found this perfect solution to all my problems.

My body's shrinking. I'm not menstruating anymore. I don't have any breasts. I don't have any curves. I have a childlike body again. Oh, my God. I don't look like a woman. There was a sense of overcoming the restrictions and the limitations of nature itself.

You said that this started, and this just goes back a little bit, But you said this started in some ways when you were going through puberty. And your mom talked about how this kind of metamorphosis happens, where girls had to turn over and die and be born again. And you had said, and you say in the film, that what you wanted to do was stop time. What was that about? I'm really fascinated by the idea of time as being the one thing that we can't control. We can control our body size.

we can control the way our features, you know, modify, you know, with plastic surgery and other ways, but we can't control time. And I was always fascinated by the idea of, oh, girls turn into women. The word turning, always fascinating, turning into what the girl in you dies so that the woman can emerge. And I use the metaphor of the caterpillar turning into butterfly to explain that and me stuck between the caterpillar and butterfly and deciding, no, I'm not going to transform. You can't make me die and be born again into the butterfly. My sister's transformation

was kind of the other side, like she was able to emerge from the rabbit hole and transform into the butterfly and, you know, becoming a woman, whereas I did not. As I mentioned, it was your mom that told you that this is what was going to happen to you. She had had a hard life. She, as you say, was a teacher with an accent that nobody would hire. And she was homesick and stuck at home in many ways, having to cook, having to take care of the family because she couldn't get a job outside of the house. Here's how you describe your mother in the film.

Have a listen to this. The cook. The housewife who got sick with homesickness. The sickness of sadness. And I caught her disease. What do you mean when you say that you caught her disease? Well, oh my God. When I wrote that line, I had to step back and going,

what the hell did I just write? I can't believe I said that. You know, I can't believe I wrote that. And do I want to put it out there? Because writing it and filming it and making it permanent, means that it's true and it's real. And I couldn't put the genie back in the bottle. It was like, oh my God, what did I just say? My mother got sick with homesickness and I caught her disease. So I wrote that and I didn't realize what I had written, but there was a certain truth to it that came

afterwards and what I meant was I guess inherited trauma inherited mental illness I guess you know her depression how it sort of got transmitted or I internalized it because that's what kids do at least the more sensitive ones I think I was more sensitive than my sisters but I internalized a lot of my mother's difficulty in adapting to She didn't have difficulty adapting, is that the culture didn't accept her. You know, she worked really hard to adapt, and she was ready to be a part of the community, but the community didn't take her in the way she had hoped. And so that's what led to her homesickness and her depression.

Is that how we define mental illness? I'm not sure. It thinks it's a social illness. I think it's a result of maybe racism. that's what was underneath those lines in retrospect because I wrote it without really thinking. What were you seeing? Before you started down the road to an eating disorder, you were looking through fashion magazines. What did you see in those magazines? And what did they do to you? Oh my God. I'm a lover of images. I'm a filmmaker. I'm a photographer.

part of it is just the aesthetics of it and the love of art as someone who makes art and the inspiration. So it came a lot of from that. But you thought you could never be in those magazines. Yeah, I couldn't, but I could create them. And yeah, that was the heartache. You know, that's the paradox of loving the artistry of it. And yet knowing you can't be that because I never saw. very few. I mean, I did see a few black models, but South Asian models, I can remember

one supermodel, but other than that. And just the sense of freedom and comfort that these models had, and they were thin. They had small breasts and very little curves and were athletic, and they had bodies that I could never have. But, you know, in terms of the anorexia, it was kind of an internalized misogyny, I would say, because I was rejecting the idea of traditional womanhood, of traditional femininity. And by becoming anorexic, I didn't become thin.

I became emaciated. It was like a defiant act towards those models. as well. So as you want to see skinny, I'll show you skinny. You know, so there was a sense of anger and rage behind the anorexia that drove, you know, that gave me energy. Somewhere in me, I knew I was doing that, that there was kind of a feminist response. Maybe that is a bold, incorrect statement to say, but it was for me. Hey there, I'm David Kahn. If you're like me, there are things. you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy.

Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you've got to know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out, This is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. You say that you decided to turn your body into a project. So you and your sister, Seema, go on this diet. But after a while, she quits and then you don't quit. Why didn't you quit?

Just like I said, you know, there was a sense of a high that I got. I just kept dieting and kept losing and losing and losing. So there was a sense of having come upon something really, really powerful. and I wasn't going to let it go. And I, in fact, felt more energized, but my sister, she started to feel weak and she wasn't feeling good in her body, you know, from dieting, from restricting her intake. So she stopped, and she, I think she had a barometer inside her knowing this is like, this is wrong.

You know, we're going too far now. I'm going to stop this. It's not healthy anymore. And I was like, I'm not letting this go. It was like a drug. I mean, that's the only way I can describe it is like a drug. What don't people understand about eating disorders? Because the way that you're describing it, I think, runs counter to how some people from the outside might think about it.

So what is it that you think people don't understand about what you are going through? It's difficult to describe because if I'm really going to go granular about it, is the experience of existing inside one's body. Like, as to think about it, it's this just incredible discomfort inside one's skin. And maybe people who are trans can understand to a certain degree or have body dysmorphia can understand, but there's this intense, intense sensitivity to one's body and changes in one's body. and the discomfort someone feels. How difficult was it for your family when this led you to end up in a hospital?

Well, my mother was the most concerned. She really tried to make me see how this was not good and that there was something wrong with me. She didn't have a word for it. I remember going to a library with her one day and she pulled out a book and she pulled out a book and she opened the page and she found it

write the word and she pointed to it and she made me read it so listen, read this, read this this is what you have this is what you have like remember that moment that she said

and I didn't want to look at it so she took me to the doctor and he diagnosed me and I was admitted at that point it was also difficult for my younger sister I remember a moment

where she was crying She was like, I realized because she was really tough. She didn't show her feelings. But at that moment, when I refused to eat dinner, she cried. And she was just alone with me. My parents were out. And I noticed like, oh, my God, this is really affecting her in a way I didn't realize. So that was a really important moment.

How did she help you recover? I mean, she stops the diet, but also she strides out into the world, right? How did that help you? I mean, I didn't at the time think that she had any influence. It's really in the making of the movie. I kind of learned a lot by looking at photos because there's a lot of home movies and archival footage that I have accumulated and going through photos of her and telling that story of the diet,

I really got to know her with my adult eyes in a way that I didn't. at the time. And I think in hindsight, I feel like she did play a part in eventually sort of helping me see that this was not the right way to go and continue. And I couldn't sustain that. And what really got me out was that I had a goal. I had a concrete goal to look forward to because at the hospital, I just felt like, what am I going to do when I go out? It's just going to be cold, cool world. I don't know who I am. I don't know what I wanted to. And I saw an ad in the paper, you know, you can study photography. And I said, what? You can actually have a degree in photography. And I was taking pictures while I was in the hospital. And I think I show a bit of that

in the film. And I started accumulating photos and put together a portfolio. And I said, okay, I have something to look forward to. I want to be a photographer. It's a passion for photography and filmmaking is ultimately what got me out. I mean, what's also interesting is there's a moment where you're brushing your sister's hair and you look at her neck

and you realize, I mean, you thought for a long time that that she was the one to aspire to, that she was somebody who perhaps had the body that she wanted. What did you notice when you looked at the back of her neck was as you were brushing her hair?

Yeah, it was Kind of, again, in making the movie and going through photos, I noticed a difference in the way she presented herself in front of the camera when she was young. She was a kid versus when she was older, you know, 16, 15. And there was a kind of reservedness she had when she was older, she was hiding a bit more shy, which was so different from the girl that I thought she always was. and I remember that, you know, she had a tendency to wear makeup that made her skin look lighter than she was because she was a darker-skinned brown girl and she was very self-conscious about her skin color and that memories kind of jumped back at me when I was working on the film and I decided to put it in the film that she had, she was insecure about her skin color.

So I decided to bring that into the story, showing that she also had issues about her body and herself that I didn't realize. You made this movie in memory of Seema and in memory of your mother. They both died in the Air India bombing in 1985. Yes, yeah. Yeah, that was something I didn't bring up in the movie. It was just opening another can of worms. I guess it's made in the memory of them, particularly my little sister,

because she plays a big role in the film. What was it like, I mean, you mentioned all of that home footage that your father had shot over the years and some of the photos that you had taken as you were a budding photographer. What was it like to go back and revisit that all those years later, knowing that they're gone, but knowing the influence that they had had on your life?

I was very hesitant to make this movie. I kind of broke down before the producers, Joe Belas and Ariel Nesser, and I said, I don't know if I can do this. Do I want to open these boxes and go through these photos and do this? And they took the pressure off. This is just no rush. Just take your time because I felt the pressure of time as well. And once they did that, I just stepped back and I said,

I'm just going to have fun with this. I don't know if anything will come of it anyway. and I just went through it and I have to say for me to look at the photos of my little sister was like the gift that I gave myself because I hadn't really ever grieved her loss so that was a real joy.

I mean I cry every time I see pictures of her but that was kind of a way to remember them For me, that's my personal experience. But for the audience, it's a story that was about the journey of me going through this eating disorder and my relationship with my family. When you look back at the photos of yourself when you were that young, do you recognize yourself? You know what? I'm so detached to photos of myself and my own story, like the eating disorder and everything. I'm just, I'm a storyteller and I'm kind of telling the story.

So I just see myself as a character, like a fictional character, in a movie. It's funny, but that's how, I guess, just being a filmmaker and a screenwriter, I have that ability to do that, to be just very objective about me. So I'm very removed. It's very bizarre. Can I ask you finally just about the impact that this film has had? I mean, the NFP put it out. The New York Times featured a shorter version of the documentary on their way.

website a few weeks ago, which is how I first saw it and how a lot of other people have seen it. And you wrote for the times that you wanted to tell your stories so that girls and women who are going through or have gone through something similar might feel less alone. And there are pages and pages of comments behind and below your film from people who have had that experience. I just wonder what you have heard from people about how a very personal movie like this has affected them. Yeah, it's been amazing and astonishing at the same time because I think different people related to different aspects, you know, the sister relationship, the competitiveness between sisters.

You know, I think that was the point of people connecting and connecting emotionally to the story and connecting to a certain truth that perhaps is universal. So, you know, there was even a middle-aged man who wrote and says, I never had an eating disorder. I don't even have a sister. And I, you know, cried and I could connect with your story. So it was able to transcend all of these literal connections, I guess, and talk about something maybe more existential, you know, about time. about one's family, about returning home or about home itself, about mothers and daughters.

So what I wanted to do is not talk about anorexia in the most sort of predictable way and come at it from the back door and go, hey, look, this is what it is. Like someone who had never seen a movie about it before, I have ever heard about anorexia before, to present it in that way. So it's just fresh and new and completely a thing in itself. It must be really powerful to get those kind of responses back from people. It is. It's absolutely rewarding, I think, this is why I do it.

I'm glad to talk to you about this film. It is really quite something, and I'm glad that you're doing okay now. Thank you. Yeah. Isha, thank you very much. Thank you. Isha Marjara is a filmmaker in Quebec. You can watch her documentary.

Am I the skinniest person you have ever seen on the National Film Board's website? She was in Montreal. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.