Hi, I used to be a fairly fit but overweight person
IN the pandemic I became morbidly overweight at BMI of 50.
I have started gymming and weight loss is great so far. I am no stranger to Intermittent Fasting.
Currently working out 6 days a week, starting with resistance training and ending with a 45min cardio session on the treadmill
I am currently doing OMADs everyday. Dont really track what I eat, but ensure my OMAD has all major nutrients and I eat till I am full/stuffed.
Considering my high fat body percentage :
q1. would it make sense if i fasted fully on my rest day?
q2. would it affect my muscle repair? fasting on rest day
q1) Sure. It’s probably not necessary for your weight loss goal at this point in time, but it will help stimulate HGH, autophagy, and just be good for you in general. Autophagy should help tighten up skin as you lose weight, which is probably the main reason I would do it.
q2) At the end of a 48 hour fast (which is what you will be doing if you eat your day before and day after OMADs at the same time), HGH is five times higher than baseline. So yes, it will effect your muscle repair, in a good way.
I will say I personally prefer to train on the evening of my fasting days. I do two 48 hour fasts per week and prefer to train deep into my fast, and it’s fine. Certainly much better than training shortly after a meal.
I just do 2 x 36 hour fasts and try to do my rest days on those days (I’ll do yoga, etc).
Whatever you do is always going to be a compromise. yes, fasting will affect your ability to recover / build muscle. It will also cause you to lose weight faster, but possibly lose more muscle as part of that.
Bodybuilders obsess about these things and how to cut weight with minimal muscle loss is something you can go into insane detail optimizing as far as timing protein and carb intake, and hitting exact macros.
The most important things as far as I can tell are to eat a lot of protein (upwards of .8g per pound of bodyweight), dont lose weight too fast, about 1lb a week at most is viewed as a good balance for maintaining muscle. Optimize your workouts to not cause too much hypertrophy since you arent going to have the nutrients to recover fully. Most body builders dont do more than 16-20 hour fasts (if at all) from what Ive seen, but again, you arent necessarily a bodybuilder and I think if you stick to the main points you’ll get good results without having to obsess to the degree a bodybuilder does, I know I definitely dont want to live that way.