'90s fitness icon Susan Powter disappeared from public life after 'mortifying' Hollywood experience
While building a successful career as a fitness guru in the '90s, Susan Powter, who rose to fame as the face of the "Stop the Insanity!" infomercial, host of "The Susan Powter Show" and author of many diet and weight loss books, was secretly fighting her own battle behind the scenes.
"They started to produce the 'me' out of me," Powter, who is promoting her new book, "And Then Em Died…Stop the Insanity! A Memoir," told People magazine.
"And that happened when the money got to here [raising her hand up high]. Then, it was like, 'Oh, Suze, don't say that. No, no. It's a little too much. Oh, you're shocking. Shocking.' But that's the same shock that got me there.
"I worked very hard on ['The Susan Powter Show']. Shooting three shows a day. I did it with everything I had," she added. "But it was mortifying. They put me in pearls. Look at me. Do I look like the pearl type? And I didn't have any say. All those segments, I can't even watch them now."
Powter's road to success started at one of the darkest points of her life. She was a 260-pound mother of two in the midst of a bitter divorce.
"I was a frightened, angry, isolated single mother who dealt with trauma by shoving fat into my mouth," the Australian native, who moved to the United States with her family when she was 10 years old, told the Washington Post in 1994. "I went up to 260 pounds. I had yo-yo'd my whole life, but I was never obese like this. I had no energy, I was depressed, my ankles were blown up. I knew I had to resurrect myself from the dead."
"I’m not kidding when I tell you I was going to blow my head off," she said while speaking at the Broadcast Advertising Club luncheon at the Hyatt Regency Chicago that same year, according to the Chicago Tribune. "I am not lying. I didn’t want to live anymore. My life was in the toilet."
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It was at that point Powter decided to take charge.
"I just got up and spoke to women," she told People. "That's what I did in the infomercial. It was unrehearsed, unscripted. And those women responded."
Through her infomercial, Powter offered a health package that combined a low-fat diet with an exercise regimen. According to The Washington Post, the $79.80 package included five audio tapes, an exercise video, a recipe collection, a guide to food-fat content and a caliper to measure body fat.
At the time, Powter was selling approximately 15,000 of these packages each week, grossing in the $5 million range, according to the Post.
Before she knew it, the fitness guru had established a name for herself and signed her first contract with her manager and an investing partner in hopes of developing "an exercise studio and maybe a clothing line," she told People.
Her career unexpectedly skyrocketed as she began appearing on the nationally syndicated daytime talk show "The Home Show" and was given a $2 million advance for her first book. She once sold $50 million in products yearly, according to People.
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"Nobody expected that," she told the outlet.
While things seemed to be running smoothly, Powter said she slowly began to lose control of herself, her image and her business plan.
"I wasn't running my company; it was a 50/50 deal," said Powter, who eventually attempted to separate herself from the business deal she was in at the time. "There was nothing but lawsuits in the ‘90s."
In 1995, Powter filed for bankruptcy.
"Yes, there was money, but I never had $300 million in the bank account," she said. "I never made the money that I generated."
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Powter made the life-changing decision to leave Hollywood and live a much simpler life in Seattle with her three children.
"I didn't just make a decision to leave. My heart got stomped in half," said Powter, who came out as lesbian in 2004. "It was shocking. I was furious. And I was just like, I'm just out."
Powter opted for a "hippie" lifestyle that left her feeling "very happy" for a period of time. But, before she knew it, she was struggling financially.
"Try to get a job as a 60-year-old woman," said Powter, who eventually moved to Las Vegas and has been delivering for Grubhub and Uber Eats the past six years.
"I’ve known desperation," added Powter, who lives in a low-income senior community. "Desperation is walking back from the welfare office. It’s the shock of, ‘From there, now I’m here? How in God’s name?’"
Despite losing hope, Powter's faith was restored when actress Jamie Lee Curtis approached her with the idea of documenting her life story.
"I was in tears," Powter said of first meeting Curtis, an executive producer on the upcoming documentary called "Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter." "And I said 'Thank you. Thank you for believing in me. I had lost faith. I had lost complete and absolute hope.'"
"As one of the world's first true influencers at the beginning of what we would now refer to as the social media era, Susan Powter was brazen and brave, and woke us all up," Lee told People of Powter. "Like so many women's stories, Susan's power and her light was diminished, denigrated and dismissed."
Powter said she's looking forward to reconnecting with people around the U.S. as she begins to promote her book and is eager to continue building her legacy.
"Those women will hear my voice, and they'll be like, 'Well, goddamn, she hasn't changed one bit.'" she said. "What I feel now is the possibility of possibilities. There were days and days, months and months and years of not feeling that. I lost hope, but I'm filled with it now. I have never been more excited."