Son of a bitch. It did come up on preview. No, asshole blogger, I am not interested in stealing your picture. If anyone cares, do a Google image search on the word Powter, and the last picture on the first page of results (at least currently) is the close-up of the Powter scalp I was trying to link to.
I cannot believe I’ve posted four times in a thread about Susan Powter.
Isn’t that the “If you don’t breathe you die!” lady? I always used to wish someone would pay me thousands of dollars to earnestly screech the obvious on late-night tv.
“If you don’t sleep you get tired!”
“If you don’t pee you strain your bladder!”
“If you don’t fart you spontaneously combust!”
Where’s my paycheck?
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You can get around the hotlink blockers most of the time if you copy and paste the link into the URL bar, but add a space to the end before hitting enter. Worked for me.
</hijack>
You don’t even have to add a space in this instance, the copy and paste alone works fine.
As to the OP…
As of three years ago or so, she was running a work out class out of one of the local rec centers here in Seattle. We had a martial arts group that worked out in the class next door for a short while. She wore a head mike with an amp and her class resonated the walls and made it quite difficult for us (even being a noisy slamming-in-the-hardwood-judo-throws atmosphere) for us to concentrate.
Thankfully, it only went on for a couple of months, I don’t know if her class folded or left for somewhere else.
Did you mean, “Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life?”
If so, that’s Brooke Shields.
No, there was another woman who was going to teach you how to breathe properly and this would enable you to lose hundreds of pounds. I don’t remember her name but it wasn’t Susan Powder OR Brooke Shields. She was sort of attractive and always made a point of telling us how old she was (50, I think).
I’d say she went to the same limbo every other 15-minutes-of-famer went.
Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.
My personal story: I was an assistant manager at a Barnes & Noble in West LA where she was scheduled to do a book signing about 6 years ago. This was during one of her attempted comebacks after her 15 minutes had passed. Somewhere between the bald period and the funky hair extension period.
Luckily didn’t have to be there. I come back the next day to hear that no one had shown up. She stuck around for a short period of time before leaving.
I get a call from the publisher rep to talk about the book signing. None of the other managers who attended the signing were working at the time, and I told her that. She continues to ask me about the event, and have to continually remind her that I was not there. She’s asking stuff like, “What do you think went wrong? Do you think there was anything else we could have done?” So I’m trying to console the girl, without stating that Powter’s 15 minutes are just over. “I don’t think there was anything else could have been done. Announcements were placed in the newspapers. Signage was put all over the store. It rained that day, maybe that played a role. You know, sometimes these signings don’t work out for no apparent reason”
Well the next day I get called into the office. The publisher and Susan Powter were angry with me for my uncaring attitude. I was being given a write up. I gave them my two week notice that instant.
One of the best decisions in my life.
I have no idea if there was any merit to them or not, but when she was having her 15 minutes there were allegations in the tabloids that she had not lost anywhere near as much weight as she claimed. They stated that she exaggerated how obese she had once been by a considerable margin and that the “fat pictures” she used of herself were altered to make her look bigger and that this is why they were blurry (that part is true: they were blurry). I’ve no idea if this led to her downfall or if she was just played.
Funny. Saturday I was watching my “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” Vol 1, and Susan Powter is on it. She told Space Ghost she was a transsexual. I thought, yeah, I could see that.
This probably would’ve been about the time her sobriety book came out (which I don’t think anyone has mentioned yet.) Guess how you get sober? By eating right and exercising! Oh, and it’s the government’s fault you’re a drunk.
I wish I was making that up. 
I actually liked her book Food. She was one of the first people to expose how disgusting meat processing still is in this country. (Beat “Fast Food Nation” by a good 10 years!) And that book has a lot of good input from people like John MacDougall and Dean Ornish. Still - obviously nutty. She has a bizarre writing style that is EXTREMEMLY exhausting and hard to read.
So now 20 years later while I can say I don’t recall hearing about her, I ran across an article where it seems that she is one of those who went from rags to riches to rags again:
By 2018 life started getting “scary as shit.” Forced to move from a campground where she’d been living in an RV to a notoriously dangerous complex in Las Vegas with weekly rent, she began delivering for Grubhub and later Uber Eats, desperately hoping to pocket at least $80 a day so she could afford to eat and make rent. “It’s so hard. It’s horrifyingly shocking,” she says of trying to make ends meet. “If sadness could kill you, I’d be dead.” …
Then about a year ago, she had a health scare that spurred her to apply for Social Security. And she began receiving a monthly check, which has been a lifeline, she says. "That $1500 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.
$50 million annually? Someone didn’t take this simple advice.
