’90s fitness queen Susan Powter reveals ‘mortifying’ experience with TV fame, ‘can’t even watch’ her talk show

Powter’s “Stop the Insanity!” infomercial made her a household name in the ’90s, but she said she ‘didn’t have any way’ in how she was produced on her 1994 talk show.

Fitness queen Susan Powter, whose Stop the Insanity! infomercial swept the nation with its alternative approach to diet culture in the early 1990s, has opened up about her “mortifying” experience with TV fame — and feeling out of control of her own short-lived talk show, The Susan Powter Show.

After previously revealing that, at age 66, she now supports herself on delivering meals for Uber Eats and $1,500 monthly Social Security checks, Powter told PEOPLE that her ’90s stardom quickly fell apart due to bad business deals and alleged lawsuits from those she surrounded herself with.

After rising to prominence with her story of losing weight after reaching 260 pounds following the birth of two sons, Powter said she signed a contract with a manager and an investing partner to help launch a company “for an exercise studio and maybe a clothing line,” but that soon evolved into a $2 million advance for a book and a one-season stint on The Susan Powter Show, a nationally syndicated talk series that ran from 1994 to 1995.

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“I wasn’t running my company; it was a 50/50 deal,” however, Powter claimed. “They started to produce the ‘me’ out of me,” she continued. “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.”

Powter admitted that she “worked very hard on that show” and that she filmed three episodes per day. “But it was mortifying,” she continued. “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.”

She also recalled that her business ventures earned around $300 million, but, that didn’t equate to that sum “in the bank account” she owned.

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“I never made the money that I generated,” she said.

“I didn’t just make a decision to leave. My heart got stomped in half,” Powter, who now lives in Las Vegas, added of the betrayal she felt amid the soured relationship with various business partners. “It was shocking. I was furious. And I was just like, I’m just out.”

In addition to her talk show, Powter was impersonated on Saturday Night Live, starred in a one-episode guest appearance alongside Will Smith on a 1994 episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and even a planned role on the 1995 sitcom Women of the House, which never made it to air. She additionally appeared on an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race as a season 3 guest judge in 2011, before clips of her Shopping With Susan VHS tape went viral on TikTok in recent months.

Powter’s outlook is brighter these days, as she’s currently working with filmmaker Zeberiah Newman and Oscar-winning actress Jamie Lee Curtis on a documentary feature about her life, which is set for release in 2025. She also recently released a self-published memoir, And Then Em Died… Stop the Insanity! A Memoir.