'Stop the Insanity!' fitness icon Susan Powter lost millions after '90s fame, reveals she survived delivering Uber Eats

"If sadness could kill you, I'd be dead," Powter said in a new interview ahead of her comeback that includes a memoir and Jamie Lee Curtis-produced documentary.

Fitness icon Susan Powter, whose memorable "stop the insanity" catchphrase helped define the wellness and weight-loss craze that swept American pop culture in the 1990s, has opened up about life after her meteoric rise to stardom in a revealing new interview.

The 66-year-old, who via her notable infomercials, VHS specials, and even her own short-lived talk show — attempted to buck diet culture trends with alternative approaches in the early '90s, revealed to PEOPLE that she lost millions of dollars in earnings in the years after her popularity waned, and turned to delivering for food services like Uber Eats and Grubhub to survive.

"I’ve known desperation," Powter told the publication, also noting that she now lives in a low-income senior community that receives free meals from a local Las Vegas charity, after she sold nearly $50 million in annual products at the height of her fame, and lost it due to a mixture of bad business deals and lawsuits, she said. "Desperation is walking back from the welfare office. It’s the shock of, ‘From there, now I’m here? How in God’s name?’"

<p>Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty</p> Susan Powter

Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty

Susan Powter

Powter said that in 2018, life began to get “scary as s---” for her, after she moved from a campground (where she lived in an RV) to a housing complex in Nevada. She then began to deliver for Grubhub and Uber Eats, making around $80 per day. "It's so hard. It's horrifyingly shocking," she said. "If sadness could kill you, I'd be dead."

Part of that frustration resulted from the thought that "there would never be another book or video," and fears that she "wouldn't be able to make a living" to support her sons in the aftermath. She also said that she was fired from a job as a waitress after her boss found out who she was.

“She Googled me and said, ‘What are you doing here?’" Powter claimed. "She thought I was doing an exposé."

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It's a far cry from Powter's '90s notability in the wellness space, which led to her aforementioned Susan Powter Show series (which ran from 1994 to 1995), a spoof on Saturday Night Live, a one-episode guest appearance alongside Will Smith on a 1994 edition of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and even a planned role on the 1995 sitcom Women of the House, which never materialized. She also appeared on an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race as a season 3 guest judge in 2011, years before clips of her Shopping With Susan VHS tape began going viral on TikTok in recent months.

Powter, who came out as a lesbian in 2004 and still delivers for Uber Eats to support herself on top of receiving a $1,500 monthly check from Social Security, also spoke about the pain she feels when people recognize her during her shifts, and sometimes ask if she "used to be Susan Powter," she recalled, adding that she would then return to her car and cry.

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"That $1,500 check shocked the hell out of me. Whoever said money can't buy happiness lied. Liar. It wasn't happiness. It was bigger than happiness. I took the deepest breath," she said. "And this is not just a 'you used to have millions and now you don't' story. This is a very real thing that many, many women go through."

Though she has no plans to return to the fitness space, she recently released a self-published memoir, And Then Em Died... Stop the Insanity! A Memoir, and Jamie Lee Curtis is producing an upcoming documentary about her life with director Zeberiah Newman.

"Susan was one of the world’s first true influencers at the beginning of what we would now refer to as the social media era,” Curtis told PEOPLE of her interest in making Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter. “She was brazen and brave, and woke us all up."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.