There are thousands of different ways to carb cycle but it is BY FAR the most useful cutting tool I've ever used. I have no problem building muscle, but cutting fat is the biggest pain in the ass for me so I rely on carb cycling like its my life blood. It is true you need to determine which way you respond best to and which fits best into your lifestyle.
The idea is based on short term manipulation of your carb burning. It generally takes a day or two at least for your body to respond to a change in the general way you eat. For ex, if you generally eat clean but go have a big pizza & beer blow out on Sat night, by Sunday / Monday you may be a big watery blob. Then a couple days later your body manages to syphon out all the water retention etc and get back to normal. So if you've been running on say 150 g of carb for a period of time, eating that regularly every day (e.g. like when you can post up a 1 day meal plan and that pretty much represents what you eat every day) -- your body has probably become accustomed to that style of eating --> that amount of fuel.
So say you cut all yoru complex carbs out immediately -- by 2-3 days later, you will feel like shit, want to sleep all the time, no energy & generally moody & lethargic. That's because your brain seeks out carbs to run. You actually start to feel stupid in the head when you are really depleted. You also start to look flatter in the muscles, and you'll drop a bunch of water weight. (This is also the idea behind the 2 weeks starting phase of the Atkins diet.) This is a graphic description of what its like to start a restricted carb deplete. For the CKD diet, it may be a full 7 day no / low carb depletion w/ a big fat carb up at the end of the week. You'll lose bodyfat but its not the greatest for if you are trying to train because you won't have any energy after the first 3-4 days.
So you try to find an amount of complex carb that will fuel your body efficiently for what you are trying to do -- e.g. train hard & heavy (i.e. so you actually do see increases in your lifts) + cardio. Probably 150 g / day is a reasonable amount. -- That's like 1/2 c oatmeal + 2 4-5 oz sweet pototos over the course of the day (I'm excluding veggie cals here. - only talking about complex carbs.) So over a 3-4 day period, you want to reduce your intake of carbs while your body continues to burn as if it was getting the regular 150 g of carb /day. So you would be burning thru everything you eat plus some stored energy (bodyfat). But just before your body realizes that it is actually getting less carb than it expected and starts to slow down your metabolism to match the new lesser amount of carb (thus stallign out your bodyfat burning), you refeed.
Here are a couple different variations on the deplete / refeed (again only referring to complex carb intake, veggies would stay the same):
- Day 1-3, no carb, Day 4 - carb up, Day 4-5 no carb, Day 7 carb up.
- CKD: day 1-6 no carb, day 7 carb up
- 4 day deplete: day 1 - 150 g carb, day 2- 100 g carb, day 3- 50 g carb, day 4 - 0 g carb, day 5 = day 1
- 3 day deplete: day 1 - 150 g carb, day 2- 100 g carb, day 3 - 50 g carb, day 4 = day 1
There are also ways to work w/ the calories of each day:
- carb deplete, but replace the depleted carb cals w/ fat cals (e.g. remove 50 g complex carb, replace w/ 1 tbsp flax seed oil in the same meal) -- this generally keeps your total cals the same, but the ratio of P/F/C changes.
You can also further take advantage of the amount of carbs you are eating by matching your work outs to the different levels of energy (carbs) availabe, e.g.:
- heavy leg day falls on high carb days
- cardio only on the really low carb days
- less heavy lifting days on med carb days.
Also as mentioned by treil - you need to be very aware of how your moods change relative to the amount of carb you have in your body. My first competitoin prep cycle - I had a meeting w/ my boss about a really friggen trivial pricing issue and it was abotu 4 weeks out from my show and it was a low carb day and on the edge of my 3 hr limit before my next meal. I scared the living shit out of her when my mouth finally went off about some particular issue. 2 yrs later I was talkign w/ a co-worker who happened to mention that the only time this boss commented on something I'd done was when I became particularly confrontational about some little price thingy -- I was like .. Oooooh ya... I remember that day..... That's how uncharacteristically evil I had gotten as a result of a low carb day. Its almost like the day your monthly PMS kicks in... So that means its UP TO YOU to be aware of the mood change you will probably experience on those days and UP TO YOU to learn how to manage it -- its not anyone else's fault or responsibility to understand you or deal w/ you if you choose to add this particular "mood manipulation" to your diet. You can plan on being pissy on the low carb days and its your responsibility to manage it so it doesn't do things like make you lose friends or your job because you went off on someone about somethign that is not really that important. (lol my usual caveat about dieting...)
I'd also note that I've tried many different carb rotations - they all seem to work reasonably well for me, but I've also learned to manage the asssociated mood swings & lack of energy a lot better than in the past so I can successfully do the longer runs. The question is finding the one that works the best for you as far as meeting yoru training & daily functional needs while cutting the bodyfat.
- carb deplete and don't replace the cals - so you are cal cycling as well.
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As if we would steer you in the wrong direction ... 
