Former health guru Susan Powter has become an Uber Eats driver in Las Vegas, Nevada, after losing her million-dollar fitness empire.
In the Nineties, Powter became a fitness icon with her infomercial Stop the Insanity!, where she shared her approach to healthy eating, exercise, and weight loss. Although she established a fitness program that earned millions, given the thousands of audiotapes and recipes it sold, she later lost her empire and declared bankruptcy in 1995.
After she spent years financially struggling, she took on a job as a food delivery driver in 2018 — a gig from which she’s still earning a living.
She discussed the rise and fall of her fame during a Q&A session at the Bentonville Film Festival on June 18, following the premiere of her new documentary, Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter. The film shows her responsibilities as an Uber Eats driver, including the upsetting experience of delivering the very fast food meals that she’d criticized on her infomercials.
“I’ve literally died a thousand deaths delivering Sonic burgers. I’m not kidding,” she said while speaking to Deadline at the Q&A session. “I’ve wept, but I’m allowed to feel it. I’m allowed to be afraid. I’m allowed to feel like I’m going to die. I’m allowed to feel like the biggest loser on the planet Earth.”
Despite the disappointment she’s felt in her job, after losing her million-dollar empire, she said that she still goes out the next day and continues going to work.
“So it’s rage. You are allowed to be enraged,” she added. “I didn’t heal. I’m not full of love and joy. I’m enraged and full of love and joy.”
When Deadline’s moderator for the Q&A said that Powter was brave for speaking out about her financial struggles, she pushed that opinion aside.
“People say, ‘It’s courageous.’ I’m not courageous,” Powter argued. “The only reason I’m not dead is because I wasn’t going to go down like that. As a woman, as a single mother, I wasn’t going down as a victim.”
Powter seemed to fade away from the spotlight quickly after she rose to fame. In 1994, she was running her fitness program, Stop the Insanity!, and hosting her first syndicated show, The Susan Powter Show, where she discussed social and political issues that women faced.
However, she told People in October that she realized the 50/50 split she’d made with business partners in the Nineties wasn’t a fair deal, so she decided to sue them. However, her business partners countersued her before she declared bankruptcy in 1995 and lost her company. This loss came after she’d sold $50 million in products annually.
“There was nothing but lawsuits in the Nineties,” she said.
The mother of three sons shared that by 2018, life was getting “scar as s***,” forcing her to move to a dangerous complex in Las Vegas with a weekly rent. She then began working for Grubhub and later Uber Eats, in hopes of making at least $80 a day to afford food for her children and rent.
“It’s so hard. It’s horrifyingly shocking,” she said. “If sadness could kill you, I’d be dead.”
She explained that in 2023, she had a health scare that allowed her to apply for Social Security, and she started receiving a monthly check of $1,500. From there, she was able to build her savings and put more of her food delivery money in the bank.
Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter was directed by Zeberiah Newman and executive produced by Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis. Future plans for the film are still in development.
