I’ve been doing IF during the week and fasting over the weekends. I’m concerned about my protein intake when I am eating. On IF days, I’m getting 50-75g. I’m 6’2” 250lbs. I’d guess 25-30% body fat.
I’m not very hungry. So eating more protein seems like I’ll have to force myself to eat more.
Suggestions?
You’re asking an intermittent fasting question to a community of people who practice prolonged fasting. The two are not interchangeable. With prolonged fasting, you eat a substantial amount of calories on a refeed. Effectively, the calories end up not mattering because you become so leptin sensitive that you become to satiated to overeat. I’ve done IF in the past and it worked well for me, but you have to worry about calories more when you do that. With prolonged fasting, you get a period of autophagy and ketosis, and then you get a period where you’re anabolic getting lots of calories and protein.
If you really want to stick with IF and I were you, I’d just try eating as much protein as I believed I needed and see how that affects my fat loss. If I plateau or gain, then I’d either reevaluate that diet or just fast longer. If you aren’t at a point where you can get ripped, there’s really not a whole lot of reason to worry about holding on to muscle. People with a higher body fat percentage often overestimate the amount of muscle they have to lose, and people who are especially fat are usually atrophied (the idea that fat people have more muscle is total nonsense unless maybe you’re a sumo wrestler, and those guys actually practice fasting). I’m saying this as a former fat guy. In any case, just not eating for a longer period of time pretty much addresses any concern you’d have over protein.
What’s more important? Maintaining whatever measly muscles you have or losing the fat? You can always build up muscle once you’re lean.