Powter Keg : She’s no longer satisfied with merely stopping the insanity. The, uh, passionate health maven blasts into your home next week on her own TV talk show.

When the applause from the studio audience finally dies down, Susan Powter gets some congratulations from the man upstairs.

It’s not God, exactly, but Executive Producer Woody Fraser, whose voice comes through Powter’s tiny earphone.

“Thank you, Woody, thank you very much,” she says into her body mike, although it looks as if she’s speaking to no one.

Beaming, she turns to her staff and squeals, “My daddy said I did a good job!

“God,” she adds at a normal octave, “I’ve just gone back 25 years.”

Even a professional motivator appreciates a little boost once in awhile.

If you don’t know the 36-year-old woman about to launch “The Susan Powter Show,” then you haven’t been channel surfing. Her “Stop the Insanity” is the tsunami of infomercials. Men who push products by torching car hoods or baking cream puffs in hot-air ovens are ripples by comparison.

She’s that wild woman with the spiky platinum buzz cut who jumps around yelling, “Fat makes you fat!” or “You’ve gotta eat, you’ve gotta breathe and you’ve gotta move!” Then, the next minute, she’s the girlfriend who makes the raw confession that she once wanted to kill her ex-husband and stresses that she’s passionate, not angry.

Using straightforward information on food and exercise--info, she admits, that isn’t original--she propels her followers, mostly women, into health, self-esteem and empowerment. Don’t want those eight glasses of water a day? Don’t want to munch on carrot sticks? Don’t want to take an aerobics class from a perky Barbie doll in a thong leotard? Fine. Neither does she.

Those who have heard her story and believed have snatched up her $79.80 infomercial package--including audio tapes, a video, a fat caliper and various guidebooks--to the tune of more than $50 million.

The phenom has become the stuff of People magazine stories. Anyone vaguely familiar with Powter probably knows this much: She’s a former Texas homemaker whose white-picket-fence life exploded when her husband left her to raise two young children on her own. She ate herself into a 260-pound stupor before she “figured it out.” That is, she discovered that low-fat foods and a basic exercise program were her salvation.

But her story doesn’t end minus 133 pounds later. There was a stint as a topless dancer, the time she was kept by a married man, the tummy tuck, the exercise studio, seminars, books, videos, the infomercial, a second marriage, the brother who blabbed to the tabloids that she never was that fat (she maintains she was).

And now the talk show.

“My husband said to me the other night, we’re lying in bed and he’s flicking through the channels, and he said, ‘God, they’d give anybody a damn talk show these days!’ And I said, ‘ Thank you! Thank you, honey, I appreciate it.’ Actually he said ‘any moron .’ ”

So here she is, in her partially furnished office in the Santa Monica studios where the show is taped before a audience. Sitting behind a rustic dark-wood desk decorated with a neo-romantic lamp, Powter exhibits the same unfettered energy as she does on television. She goes from zero to 60 in 1.3 seconds and seldom brakes.

“I came out of the womb with energy,” she says.

She gestures with hands that end in fake coral-colored nails, her words tumbling out in great, long rushes. When Powter gets angry--er, passionate --the tendons in her neck stand out. Pushing out so much verbiage at once often results in incomplete sentences, even words.

“What I always do when I start explaining what the show is,” she says, “is tell them what it isn’t. There will be no tabloid issues at all . There is no exploiting people at all . And there’s no yelling and screaming and fighting and if that doesn’t fly on TV, it ain’t gonna fly.”

She’s banking that American women are tired of watching people with over-teased hair blather about their addictions to phone sex. Her show will be celeb-free and low on experts: “Oh, please. We’ve been hearing from experts for years and it hasn’t done us a damn bit of good. Women are experts. I want to talk to a woman who’s gone through it.”

And topics? Everything from women and heart attacks to the rain forest to paper versus plastic.

“A million issues. A ba zillion . Funny? I’m going to a construction site--this is the truth --I am getting up on the beam with the guys and I want to see what the hell they’re whistling at. I’ve got the hat, the lunch box--I’m telling you, I’m doing it. I’m so afraid of heights you don’t know. Faaaabulous shows. I don’t know why anybody didn’t think of this before.”

Executive producer Fraser, a veteran of the “Home Show” and “Good Morning America,” calls Powter “lightning in a bottle” and adds, “I’ve put a lot of people in that host seat, and she’s the fastest study.”

As someone who has already been a target of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, featuring Kirstie Alley in a blonde fright wig, is the hyperbolic Powter in danger of becoming a parody of herself?

“If we get that successful in eight or nine years down the line, great,” Fraser says with a chuckle. “But you know, she’s going to have to fight that fight, and as long as she remains really interested in helping people change their lives, then she will not become a caricature of her life.”

That life now involves shuttling between Dallas and Los Angeles with her family, sons Damien, 11, and Kiel, 10, from her first marriage, and husband Lincoln Apeland. They recently bought a home in Pacific Palisades.

When in Texas, they share a duplex with her ex-husband and his wife so their kids can see both parents. She turned a bad divorce into a livable situation--look for it as a show topic.

And six years into husband No. 2, marriage still baffles her.

“I don’t understand marriage,” she says. “I’m not sure that I’m very good at it. . . . I’m learning how to be married and it’s very hard for me. I’m not that good at it, and he knows it. I mean, I don’t scream ‘wifey-poo,’ whatever that means. He’s got his own thing, he’s a musician, he does his own thing, I do my own thing. I’m not sure that I’ve decided on it yet. I’m not sure it’s my thing.”

Work is definitely her thing. But juggling a family, workouts and a TV show isn’t enough for Powter. She has written another book, this one titled “Food.” It will have her trademark no-nonsense information about nutrition and diet, plus low-fat recipes.

“I’ve been working on this for eight months every day from 5:30 in the morning,” she says. “Every day. I love this book. I love it! I can’t tell you how excited I am. Fabulous. ‘Food,’ by Susan Powter. That’s the title. ‘Food,’ by Susan Powter. I’m very excited.

“I interviewed . . . I can’t even tell you. I mean, books? You don’t know. Interviews? You don’t know. Researching and doing and going and talking to dairy farmers and everything. The FDA. We’ve got it all here. We took all the mishegosh, the muck, that everybody is confu --I mean, HDL, LDL, cholesterol, saturated fat, oil, good, bad, boil, fry, what do we do with this? I broke it down.”

That ability to relate the basics to her audience has given Powter staying power, says Dr. David Heber, chief of clinical nutrition at the UCLA School of Medicine.

“Her greatest asset is that people can connect with her, and I think that’s an important part of the therapy of obesity--there are both psychological and physical aspects,” he says. “She is honest and upfront in that she does not claim to be a scientific expert. She’s taking bits and pieces from the scientific literature and paraphrasing it correctly.”

Indeed, because her program is grounded in common sense, Powter has not drawn the criticism heaped on some weight-loss gurus.

“Swear to God, you’ll understand everything when you read this book, I’m telling you, you’re going to love it,” she says, slapping the stack of “Food” pages next to her laptop. “And then you make your own decisions because it’s your decision with your body. Have you ever seen cuter kids than this in your life? I just wanted to ask you,” she says, suddenly grabbing a picture of her sons.

“In your life have you ever seen cuter kids than this? Now they’re 10 and 11, they were, like, 5 and 6 here. But have you ever? I mean, c’mon. They’re very cute kids.”

This is the Susan Powter viewers will get beginning Monday (5 p.m. on KCAL) in their living rooms--the Susan Powter who will talk about anything, from her kids to her failed marriage to her obesity.

Because the time when she was too fat and unhealthy to play in the park with her kids is still very real in her mind. So is the memory of being too broke to pay the electric bill. She taps into the past and her emotions easily, as if they sat in a shallow well.

When she brings up her problems, women listen. They understand the pain of being left for another woman, of hurting so much that they stuff themselves, and hurt more and stuff more.

Powter might not be where she is without Rusty Robertson, the manager/publicist who took on the struggling aerobics-studio owner back in Dallas. The two are practically joined at the hip, business-wise and emotionally. They even have the same rapid-fire patter.

“I’m the planner of the future for us, and Susan makes the best of where we are,” says Robertson, a former actress.

She recalls their first meeting: “(Susan) walked in, bald, in a black leather jacket, looking great. She sat right in front of my desk and said, ‘I’ve got this program and I’m saving people’s lives. . . . Susan had been literally living below the poverty level. . . . This is a woman who truly lived on nothing. That’s why I respect Susan more than any other woman in the world, including my mother.”

With Robertson tending the big picture, Powter can work on the here and now.

“There’s a balance now that I think a lot about,” Powter says. “I have a friend staying with me for a week and . . . I spent the afternoon shopping with her, and that was hard for me and I told her that. I realized that I’d become very selfish with my time, which made me think--is that good, is that bad, is that right? I don’t know.

“Basically I don’t ever want to stop working on stuff. The day I stop working I’m going to be 10 feet under. . . . The day that it’s all OK is the day I want to have a Mack truck hit me. I mean, it’s not OK. It never will be all OK. I never want it to be all OK. I want all of it, everything.

“The other day I went for a walk and I just said, ‘Wow. I love this and I want everything and I’ll take the good and the bad, you know? Who the hell knows who I was talking, to, I was probably talking to a ficus bush. But I mean it. I want . . . I want. . . . I’m willing to take the responsibility. I will work on the bad. I’ll work toward the good, but I want it all, I just . . . c’mon, ‘cause I like it.”