Any studies to back up the"fool your metabolism" theory?

This is my opinion on the whole thing.

Lets say to lose weight, your individual calorie goal is 1700 a day. With calorie cycling, the whole thing is to eat low calories a few days a week and higher calories another couple of days. But, everyone knows that to lose one pound of fat, you must cut 3500 calories a week, right?

Given the 1700 calories a day theory, your total weekly caloric consumption would be 11,900. So, following the calorie cycling (fool your metabolism diet) it would look like this:

Sunday: 2100 Calories
Monday: 1300 Calories
Tuesday: 900 Calories
Wednesday : 2300 Calories
Thursday: 1600 Calories
Friday: 800 Calories
Saturday: 2900 Calories.

There. In an essence, you have calorie cycled for the week.

Does this look familiar to you at all? Maybe like the Weight Watchers diet plan but without points? You can save your "Points" (AKA Calories) for a treat at the end of the week?

This is really a very basic type thing. During the week, most people pay closer attention to their way of eating and exercising. So naturally most people consume less. Come the weekend, you go out for drinks and cheese dip with the girls, go to cookouts, your sweetie cooks you a full breakfast....etc. So, you would probably consume more during the weekend.

Bottom line, there is no difference in doing this above and eating at 1700 every day. As long as at the end of the week your calorie count is 11,900 (or whatever your number is) you are going to lose weight. Your body isn't going to go into "starvation mode" after a couple of days of low calorie eating. And it's not going to hold on to every single calorie on your bigger calorie days (water weight...yes. Do you have any idea how much sodium is in a margarita??)

So, my suggestion is to do what you want to do. You know you are going out with the girls for a birthday party at a Mexican restaurant and you want a margarita or two and some queso? Go for it. Just watch your caloric intake the rest of the other days to even it out.

To me caloric cycling is just a way to let people feel like they are getting "cheat days".

Sounds like your talking about the 5:2 intermittent fasting diet where for two days of the week you eat a low protein 500 cal meal the rest of the week you eat your full calorie allowance so saving around 3000 calories a week which is how you get the weight loss but the 500 days are hard and exercise is near impossible.but the health benifits are supposed to be good there is an expert on intermittent fadting called Brad Pilon who discusses it here http://bradpilon.com/weight-loss/the-52-diet-my-review/ and he also has a book about fasting