As we know, tumor is a metabolic disease. During tumor development, cancer cells need to increase the biosynthetic and bioenergetic demands to maintain tumor cell proliferation and metastasis. The focus has been mostly on the metastatic style of the primary tumor, while metabolic adjustments during primary tumor growth and metastatic process have been less well known. Present evidences indicate that metabolic regularity of tumor development is dynamic. Moreover, emerging data suggest that, once the tumor cells leave their primary sites, may show different metabolic styles, distinct from the primary tumor, to successfully survive and metastasis. In this review, we will summarize how the metabolic flexibility will be occurred during the primary tumor growth and metastatic process, and we will also explore how metabolic adaptation is influenced by the metastatic microenvironments. We hope that this review will give information for the tumor metabolic research in the future.