Yes, to both. BB's DO cycle their carbs. You are talking about Pro BBer's that do what they do for a living and do extreme things to make money at it. Do not confuse this with other BBer's who chose this as a lifestyle and watch their health.
Right—those are the guys I've known, or more accurately, people who are trying to be those guys. It's not just people competing in the pro tournaments, but a very much larger group who are trying to get their pro cards, as well as guys who don't really have professional ambitions but want the pro look. If it were just the relatively few people who compete professionally, it would be one thing; but it's much more widespread than that.
The human body is set up to burn FAT as it's primary source of fuel, glucose/ATP etc is meant as a quick burning short duration energy form. By cutting back on your carbs (the brain needs glucose to function properly) and getting your carbs mainly from vegetables, not processed breads/pastas etc. The trick is when cycling you want to burn down your glucose stores so your body has to rely on it's fat stores for energy, which in turn makes you leaner. When you know you are going to have a high impact day then you have a high carb day so your body has the quick energy stores (glucose) to use, but you also empty it back out from the exercise at the end so your body goes back to burning fat.
I know about people doing what I think you're talking about, but I've never thought of it as
cycling. When I do cardio intervals, for example, I try to do it before I've eaten anything, just so the primary fuel burned is fat. But to me, 'cycling' involves long-term fixed cycles carefully set up to so that different anabolic substances with different properties were kicking in optimally—test and D-bol cycles and so on running partially concurrently over complex six and eight week cycles and the like. Keeping your carbs low when you want to make a big dent in stored fat reserves isn't what I usually think of as cycling; it's more or less just common sense depending on the kind of exercise you're planning to do.
The problem with the way most people eat is that they are eating so many carbs that their body just relies on them for the energy and the excess is stored "for later use" and don't have to dip into their fat stores so they keep stockpiling up.
The problem is that people eat way more than they need, period, I think. Even when they exercise, a lot of folks rely on low-intensity exercise, which takes much longer than high-intensity to crack open fat reserves effectively. They also eat quick-processed carbs, which quickly leave them feeling hungry again soon, so they wind up eating more than they would if they ate complex carbs that take longer to break down.
Like a lot of other things, it's not carbs themselves that are the problem—a calorie is a calorie, I firmly believe—but the way people abuse them because they can't be bothered to eat sensibly....
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