Why ’90s Fitness Icon Susan Powter Walked Away from Her ‘Stop the Insanity!’ Fame: 'They Produced the "Me" Out of Me' (Exclusive)

Susan Powter never expected to become a fitness guru when she first started teaching exercise and nutrition to fellow housewives in Texas.

Powter, 66, was just hoping to connect with other women who could relate to her story, which has become the backbone of her massive popularity Stop the Insanity! fitness commercials and bestsellers and videos of the early 90s. She weighed 260 pounds. a mother of two who was left by her husband for another woman and who took revenge by getting fit.

“I just got up and talked to women,” she tells PEOPLE. “That’s what I did in the ad. It was unrehearsed, unscripted. And those women responded.”

Powter in his ‘Stop the Insanity!’ informercial around 1993 ‘Stop the Insanity!’ ’90s fitness guru Susan Powter loses multimillion-dollar empire and survives by delivering Grubhub: ‘Scary as S—‘ (Exclusive)

When Powter signed her first contract with her manager and the investment partner who founded her company, “it was for an exercise studio and maybe a clothing line. That’s it,” she says. But within a year, she was appearing on a national daytime talk show Home show and received a $2 million advance for her first book. “Nobody expected that,” she says.

The success “was huge and it was fun,” he says Forcewho was enough of a cultural icon that SNL snagged her and named her one of PEOPLE’s 25 Most Intriguing People of 1993. “And that was the biggest relief as a single mom, because I was like, ‘Shit, I can make a life.’ And I had a current husband who was a musician, who never worked in our marriage, and an ex-husband who I was paying to take care of his kids, so I was thrilled.”

Susan Powter in PEOPLE’s Most Intriguing People, 1993.

But she soon realized she had handed over too much control — and money — to her business partners. “I didn’t run my own company; it was a 50/50 job,” she says. And the job started forcing her to be someone she wasn’t.

“They started making the ‘me’ out of me,” she says. “And that’s what happened when the money got here [raising her hand up high]. Then it was like, ‘Oh, Suze, don’t say that. No, no. It’s a bit too much. Oh, you are shocking. Shocking.’ But it’s the same shock that got me there.”

She felt the effects of this control most strongly after she began filming her syndicated television show, The Susan Powter Show1994 “I worked really hard on that show. Recording three shows a day. I did it with everything I had,” she says. “But it was humiliating. They put me in pearls. Look at me – do I look like a pearl guy? And I had no say. All those segments, I can’t even watch them now.”

She got out of the TV contract and tried to renegotiate the business partnership, but it ended in lawsuits. “In the ’90s, there was nothing but lawsuits,” she says. She declared bankruptcy – and realized how much of the money she was making ended up in other people’s pockets. “Yes, there was money, but I never had $300 million in my bank account,” she says. “I never made the money I made.”

Frustrated with Hollywood and looking for a simpler and cheaper life, she moved to Seattle with her newly adopted child, her third son, whom she raised as a single mother after divorcing her second husband. (Later, in 2004, she said she was a lesbian.) “I didn’t just decide to leave. My heart is broken,” she says, feeling betrayed by her business partners. “It was shocking. I was furious. And I was like out.”

In Seattle, she rented a cabin, took cooking and fitness classes and took up photography, living a “hippie” life that she says suited her. “I was away from all the big corporations…and I was very happy.”

However, over time the money ran out and by 2018 she could not get a job. “Try to find a job as a 60-year-old woman,” she says. She’s been almost penniless living in Las Vegas, where she’s been delivering for Grubhub and Uber Eats to make ends meet for the past six years, a life she tells PEOPLE that’s gotten “scary as shit.”

’90s fitness icon Susan Powter reveals how Jamie Lee Curtis helped save her: ‘I lost hope, but now I’m filled with it’ (Exclusive)

Susan Powter photographed for PEOPLE, July 2024.

Chloe Aftel

Last year, however, she found hope again — she began receiving a Social Security check, which gave her enough financial stability to save again, and she met filmmaker Zeberiah Newman, who is making a documentary about her life. That movie Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powterexecutive produced by Jamie Lee Curtis, is expected to be released next year.

Powter, who just published her memoir, is planning a campervan tour around the country and wants to reconnect with fans. And this time, she says, “no one is telling me what to do.”

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Source: HIS Education