Why ’90s Fitness Icon Susan Powter Walked Away from Her ‘Stop the Insanity!’ Fame: 'They Produced the "Me" Out of Me' (Exclusive)

Susan Powter never expected to become a fitness guru when she first started teaching exercise and nutrition to fellow homemakers in Texas.

Powter, 66, was just hoping to connect with other women who could relate to her story, which became the backbone of her massively popular Stop the Insanity! fitness infomercial, and bestselling books and videos in the early '90s. She had been a 260-lb. mom of two whose husband left her for another woman and who got revenge by getting fit.

"I just got up and spoke to women," she tells PEOPLE. "That's what I did in the infomercial. It was unrehearsed, unscripted. And those women responded."

When Powter signed her first contract with her manager and an investing partner establishing her company, "it was for an exercise studio and maybe a clothing line. That's it," she says. But within a year, she was appearing the nationally syndicated daytime talk show The Home Show and was given a $2 million advance for her first book. "Nobody expected that," she says.

The success "was huge and it was fun," says Powter, who was enough of a cultural icon to be spoofed by SNL and named one of PEOPLE's 25 Most Intriguing People of 1993. "And it was the biggest relief as a single mother, because I was like, 'Sh--, I can make a living.' And I had a current husband who was a musician, who never worked in our marriage, and an ex-husband who I was paying to take care of his children. So I was thrilled."

But she soon realized she had handed over too much control — and money — to her business partners. "I wasn't running my company; it was a 50/50 deal," she says. And the business began to push her to be someone she wasn't.

"They started to produce the 'me' out of me," she says. "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."

She felt the effects of that control most forcefully after she began filming her syndicated television show, The Susan Powter Show, in 1994. "I worked very hard on that show. Shooting three shows a day. I did it with everything I had," she says. "But it was mortifying. 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 got herself out of the TV contract and tried to renegotiate her business partnership but it ended in lawsuits. "There was nothing but lawsuits in the '90s," she says. She declared bankruptcy — and realized just how much of the money she had been making was ending up in other people's pockets. "Yes, there was money, but I never had $300 million in the bank account," she says. "I never made the money that I generated."

Frustrated with Hollywood and looking for a simpler, and less expensive, life, she moved to Seattle with her newly adopted baby, her third son, whom she raised as a single mom after splitting from her second husband. (Later, in 2004, she came out as lesbian.) "I didn't just make a decision to leave. My heart got stomped in half," she says of feeling betrayed by her business partners. "It was shocking. I was furious. And I was just like, I'm just out."

In Seattle, she rented a cabin, taught cooking and fitness classes and took up photography, living a "hippie" life that suited her, she says. "I was away from every big corporation...and I was very happy."

But over time, the money ran out, and by 2018, she found herself unable to get a job. “Try to get a job as a 60-year-old woman," she says. She was nearly penniless living in Las Vegas, where she's been delivering for Grubhub and Uber Eats to make a living for the past six years, a life, she tells PEOPLE that got “scary as sh--.”

In the past year, however, she's found hope again — she started getting a Social Security check, which gave her enough financial stability to save again, and she met filmmaker Zeberiah Newman, who is making a documentary on her life. That film, Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter, which is being executive produced by Jamie Lee Curtis, is expected to be released next year.

Powter, who's just released her memoir, is planning an RV tour around the country and wants to reconnect with fans again. And this time, she says, "nobody is telling me what to do."