Powter pushes energy, then power at talk Friday
By Kristi L. Nelson, nelsonk~knews.com
May 19, 2003
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Years ago, in the best known of her seven books, "Stop the Insanity!", Susan Powter called for a resurrection of women's bodies.
In her most recent book, the self-published "Politics of Stupid", she's demanding a revolution of women's minds.
After four years out of the media limelight - during which she filed for bankruptcy, reclaimed her name from Time Warner and adopted a third son, now 5 - Powter is touring the county in a red, bead-and-boa-bedecked mini-Winnebago hoping, she says, "to incite thinking riots in the brains of millions of mothers."
Her message, as she spends an hour and a half each night holding fast-talking, fist-pumping, pro-woman rallies disguised as book signings at Barnes & Noble Booksellers:
"The way (the world) is being run now is bulls - t. It's being run into the ground. I'm a single mother, by choice, of three boys. I want air for my children to breathe. I'm not asking politely any more! I want clean water for them to drink."
The only people who can change the world, Powter says, are women - but not while so many women lack the strength and energy to even make it through the day.
"Look around: America looks and feels horrible," Powter says. "It's the consequences of a lifestyle that doesn't work."
She's talking about food that's processed and chemical-laden. She's talking about polluted water and air, demineralized soil and the trend to "fix" women with hormones and Prozac. She's talking about corporate corruption, religions that oppress women and an American media that deals in sound bytes and doesn't reflect what's really going on in the world.
And any woman who isn't enraged about all that, she says, is "already dead."
Powter is using "The Politics of Stupid," which she says makes "Stop the Insanity!" look "like a dress rehearsal," to talk directly to women ages 13 to 70, from California and Seattle to the Deep South, including a night in Knoxville.
She wants to present them with truths that are as naked as her own body is on the cover of the book.
Some are the same truths she's been espousing more than a decade in her fitness videos, infomercials and books (three of them bestsellers). This includes the wellness cornerstones "Eat, breathe, move" that jerked her out of what she called a "fat coma" while raising her two older sons, now 19 and 20, alone after her marriage broke up.
"Losing weight is easy, like, so easy!" Powter, once 130 pounds overweight, tells women. "Your body and my body use fat for fuel. If you have 10 pounds or 100, it doesn't matter the only way your body gets rid of that fuel is to burn it up and use it."
Powter and her family eat only "healthy, clean" foods.
"Over 65 percent of America's daily caloric intake is processed crap!" she says. "Would you feed your baby poison? How many women went to a fast-food restaurant today?"
After changing their eating habits, Powter says, women need to "move in oxygen on a regular basis for the rest of their lives." Exercise, she says, is the only way to get oxygen-rich blood to every cell, the only way to build lean muscle mass tissue and raise metabolism to keep the weight off.
Revolt, she tells them, against a lifestyle that celebrates refined sugar and chemicals and dismisses mothers who won't let their
children eat birthday cake with fluorescent icing.
Revolt against the Atkins Diet. "We did the protein thing in the '70s!" she says with disgust. (emphasis added)
Revolt against television shows that put six people on different diets to lose weight in time for a class reunion.
"The worst reason to lose weight is for an event. You should lose it for your life, not for a stupid event!" she says. Besides, "If there was a diet that worked, there wouldn't be a fat person on the planet. There's no way to change anything other than hard work. It takes a long time to change a lifestyle that doesn't work."
But once you start, you'll feel it physically and mentally, Powter says: "The same blood that feeds your body feeds your brain."
It's time to use that brain to take the world over from the "boys" who are destroying it while making America fat, unhealthy and depressed, she says.
"The solution is to educate the women," Powter says. "If the women stop driving through in hordes, there won't be a fast-food industry. If the women stop cleaning the pews in the church, there won't be a church to tell them they can't be priests. If the women stop licking the envelopes for the politicians, the political system will completely fail."
She educates and motivates them with common sense, self-esteem - and humor. Quintessential wellness, she says, is celebration, education, freedom, strength, beauty, community - and female. When women become healthy and harness their power, Powter believes they will take over the world and change it for the better.
"Women are amazing," she says. "That's why they're so afraid of us. We are so amazingly capable, and they are desperately afraid of our magic."
She laughs, deeply. "And they should be."
Kristi L. Nelson may be reached at 865-342-6434. She is health writer for the News Sentinel.
"Powter pushes energy, then power at talk Friday"
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