Julia Ross, M.A., M.F.T., best selling author of The Diet Cure, is a leader in the field of nutritional psychology. Her new hardback, "The Mood Cure: The 4-Step Program to Rebalance Your Emotional Chemistry and Rediscover Your Natural Sense of Well-being", was released by Viking Press on October 28, 2002. Ross holds a masters degree in clinical psychology and has been directing counseling programs for mood, overeating and addiction problems since 1980. Ross is now Executive Director of Recovery Systems, a clinic she founded in Mill Valley, California, that treats these problems with nutrient therapy and biochemical rebalancing.

While completing her masters' degree in clinical psychology at the University of San Francisco (1973 - 75), Julia Ross worked as resident manager and supervisor at a psychiatric half way house in San Francisco. Afterward, she went to work as a psychotherapist at the Henry Ohlhoff House, a large treatment program for alcoholics and other addicts. There, in 1976, she instituted the first family therapy program for alcoholics in the Bay Area, on a fellowship from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. In 1980, after five years providing group, family and individual counseling and staff training, Ross was asked to become Director of Outpatient Programs. As outpatient director, she founded five new treatment programs in three counties: three for addicted adolescents and their families (the first in the San Francisco Bay Area), one for clients with eating disorders, and an experimental nutrition-based program for adults with both addictions and eating disorders.  

In 1986, Ross completed six years of research and development, and began to add her innovative nutritional therapy program into the treatment of all her adult clients. It radically improved their moods and dramatically reduced their cravings for carbohydrates, alcohol and drugs.  

After fourteen years, Ross left the Ohlhoff House to become Executive Director of her own clinic, Recovery Systems in Mill Valley, California. There she and her staff and consultants provide nutritional, psychological and holistic medical counseling for a wide variety of mood problems, as well as for eating and metabolic disorders and addictions. In 1996, the phenomenal success of her work with drugand alcohol addicted Native Americans earned her an award from the California State Indian Health Service. 

Ross has appeared as an expert on dozens of radio and television programs, including The Leeza Show, plus CBS, CBN, MSNBC and KRON-TV news. Ross's Recovery Systems clinic has been reported on in national and local media, such as Psychology Today, Natural Health, Alternative Medicine, and the San Francisco Sunday Examiner Magazine. Ross has also made hundreds of personal presentations to introduce health professionals and the public to her cutting edge treatment techniques, including, most recently, at the "Reward Deficiency Syndrome: Genetic Antecedents & Clinical Pathways" Conference, Weston A. Price Foundation's annual conference, and the International and American Association of Clinical Nutritionists Conference on Obesity. She has spoken at the University of Michigan, at Northwestern University, and the University of Oregon, and has frequently taught in the John F. Kennedy University graduate psychology program in Orinda, California and in the Addiction Certificate program at the University of California, Berkeley Extension.  

Ross's first book, The Diet Cure: The 8-Step Program to Rebalance Your Body Chemistry and End Food Cravings, Weight Problems and Mood Swings - Now (Viking/Penguin, 1999). was chosen by Amazon.com for its "Tremendous 10" Health, Mind and Body books in 2000. It has sold over 100,000 copies in the US, UK and Australia. 

Ross resides in Larkspur, California.