How 90s fitness guru ended up as a food delivery driver after losing multimillion-dollar empire

A ’90s fitness guru who once had a multimillion-dollar empire became a food delivery boy to make ends meet.

Susan Powter, now 66, rose to fame 30 years ago as a nutritionist, personal trainer and motivational speaker, earning $50 million a year, but almost all her money disappeared after her finances were seriously mismanaged.

Now the fitness guru calls a low-income senior living community in Las Vegas home and gets two free meals a week, Powter revealed to People.

After selling her iconic fitness program ‘Stop the Insanity! for $79.80 in the 1990s, and earning millions of dollars annually, Powter declared bankruptcy in 1995.

Although she still had some money left, Powter said she was not in control as financial advisors, business partners and her managers took over.

‘I have known despair. Despair runs back from the welfare office. It’s the shock of, ‘From there, I’m here now? How the hell?'” she told the outlet.

She admitted that she “never checked the balances in her account” and regrets not taking control of her hard-earned money.

‘I should have asked. I fully acknowledge that. I made a mistake.

“I knew how much control I was giving up. I didn’t know what was paid where, but I had no property. There was no money left for my children,” Powter said.

Just before she lost almost all of her fortune, Powter was involved in a TV show that she called “complete nonsense.”

‘They put me in pearls. They produced ‘me’ from me. Those clips – I can’t even watch them right now,” she said.

She then made the decision to leave the fitness industry, embarking on a new career path while focusing on motherhood.

‘I was teaching in the basement of an elementary school, photographing underwater home births, driving my little Volkswagen Bug with my baby, just being a mother.

“I’m a very simple hippie kind of girl,” Powter said.

In 2018, Powter confessed that her life became “scary as sh**” when she became an UberEats and GrubHub driver, earning at least $80 a day so she could eat and pay rent.

‘It’s so hard. It’s terribly shocking. If sadness could kill you, I would be dead,” she told People.

Last year, she experienced a health crisis and had to turn to collecting a Social Security check.

“That $1,500 check completely shocked me,” she said.

‘Whoever said money can’t buy happiness was lying. Liar. It wasn’t luck. It was bigger than luck. I took a deep breath. And this isn’t just a ‘you used to have millions and now you don’t’. This is a very real thing that a lot of women go through.”

Now she saves her money ‘obsessively’ and spends it sparingly.

‘I don’t spend money. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going out to eat. These are the sweatpants I always wear. Seven dollars on Amazon,” she told the outlet.

Despite struggling financially for so long, Powter initially decided to keep it a secret from her family until she wrote a book about her journey this year.

After reading her novel ‘And Then Em Died… Stop the Insanity! A memoir,” her sons told their mother they had no idea what she was going through.

Powter has since been empowered to tell her story on the big screen after contacting filmmaker Zeberiah Newman, who asked if he could make a documentary about her journey.

After years of feeling like society had forgotten her, Powter said, “I never thought that was possible,” regarding Newman’s request.

She told the outlet, “I learned that after a certain age, women are invisible and invaluable. Usually that’s the f***able age.’

Shortly after approaching Powter about the documentary offer, Newman decided to contact one of movie’s biggest stars and his good friend, Jamie Lee Curtis.

‘She [Curtis] called me two minutes later and the next day she said, ‘Go back to Vegas and start filming immediately,'” Newman recalled.

The Freaky Friday star, 66, has since become executive producer of the upcoming documentary ‘Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter.’

“As one of the world’s first true influencers at the dawn of what we would now call the social media age, Susan Powter was bold and courageous and woke us all up,” Curtis told the outlet.

“Like so many women’s stories, Susan’s power and light was diminished, belittled and dismissed.”

Powter met the actress a few months ago when they posed for a photo together.

‘I was in tears. And I said, “Thank you. Thank you for believing in me. I had lost faith. I had lost complete and absolute hope,” Powter said.

Newman said he chose to tell Powter’s story because he believes it can ignite other women who think they are forgotten as they grow older.

“Everyone who felt frustrated because the system wasn’t working for them connected with her, felt seen by her,” he explained.

Speaking about the growth he has already seen in Powter, Newman added: “She is blossoming as a person and not as a celebrity or anything in the world, as just a human being. It’s really incredible to see her regain her strength.”

After finding her voice again and getting a second chance at her career, Powter now plans to travel the country in an RV to sell her self-published book and talk to people experiencing similar struggles .

“Those women are going to hear my voice and say, ‘Well, damn, she hasn’t changed one bit,’” she said.

‘What I feel now is the possibility of possibility. There were days and days, months and months and years where I didn’t feel that.

‘I lost hope, but I’m full of it now. I’ve never been so excited.’