Susan Powter was the face of ’90s fitness, a high-energy presence in a platinum blond buzzcut urging America to abandon the fad diets and “stop the insanity!”
Her infomercials were ubiquitous as she built a fitness empire worth tens of millions of dollars and released three bestselling books. She was a wellness influencer decades before that was a term, regularly chatting it up with David Letterman and Jay Leno on late-night television.
Then she disappeared for 30 years.
Powter, 67, is now sharing her story of going from fitness fame to living paycheck to paycheck as an Uber Eats driver in Las Vegas.
Her journey is captured in the new documentary “Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter,” directed by Zeberiah Newman and executive produced by Jamie Lee Curtis. It will be released Nov. 19 in select theaters and on demand.
“Everything has changed, and I’ll tell you why,” Powter told Savannah Guthrie and Craig Melvin in exclusive TODAY interview on Nov. 18. “Because I have hope — real hope. Possibility. Real possibility. And I’m proud that I survived. I didn’t think my being would make it. I didn’t think my energy would survive.
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“My teeth didn’t. The skin looks different. My face looks different,” she continued. “But Jamie Lee is the one who said to me, ‘You are alive. You survived.’”
The Australia native, who moved to the U.S. when she was 10, rose to fame after she developed her own fitness regimen following weight gain after a divorce. The classes she taught at a local gym in Dallas became the fuel for an infomercial and fitness empire.
However, at the height of her earning power in the mid-1990s, she says a combination of bad business deals, lawsuits and a second divorce resulted in her declaring personal bankruptcy in 1995.
“I take full responsibility,” Powter said on TODAY. “I never checked. I never said, ‘Where’s the money?’ So it’s not that there was no money. … There was a little bit of money, but not the amount of money that was generated. And I just walked away. I literally walked away. I did it very intentionally.”
She says in the documentary that a fitness business that at one point was millions per year never resulted in the money ending up in her bank account.
“I wasn’t running my company. It was a 50/50 deal,” she says in the film. “There was nothing but lawsuits in the ’90s. Yes, there was money, but I never had $300 million in the bank account. I never made the money that I generated.”
After declaring bankruptcy, she moved to Seattle to raise her three children as a single mother. Powter struggled to find consistent work as she got older.
“Nothing is beneath me,” she said on TODAY. “I will work, I will do anything. … Broke is one thing, broken is another. It started to break me.”
At one point, she lived in an RV before being forced out of a campground in 2018 and into a weekly rental apartment complex in a crime-ridden area of Las Vegas.
She has little furniture in her current apartment, saying on TODAY that her bed stand is a cardboard box. She survives on Social Security checks and money from delivering food for Uber Eats.
She maintains a strong relationship with her sons, who helped her raise the money to move into her latest apartment.
“They’re very proud of me because I’ll work,” she said on TODAY.
The documentary shows how an automobile breakdown and a dental emergency immediately saps any savings she has been able to scrape together.
“You are walking back from having spent the whole day at a welfare office,” she says while crying in the film. “And you’re walking back to the welfare weekly that you live in.”
Through it all, Powter has tried to remain optimistic.
“I think something’s shifting,” she says in the documentary. “The fear, the poverty, the hopelessness. It’s this tsunami of what was, what happened, the truth. I’m betting the farm on me.”
With the release of the new film, Powter is looking toward the future.
“I want to be able to do what I’ve done once before, which was miraculous in and of itself,” she said on TODAY. “And this time it would be properly managed. … I want to do my work, and I want to have a chance.”
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
Susan Powter’s journey from ’90s fitness guru to Uber Eats driver
