Just skip the shake.
And the 4 hour gap between your workout and eating is going to a have a pretty insignificant affect on your muscle gains. Like single digit % differences that you really don’t need to worry about unless you’re competing in something and are doing all the other little things that have a similar single digit % impact on your training rails, and most likely you aren’t.
I do my fasting window from 3pm until 7am so I can eat breakfast and go for a big morning surf, otherwise I don’t have enough energy to even get out back. It is hard to not have dinner when that’s usually a social meal with friends but my body needs breakfast more. You could try just moving your fasting window :)
I’m fasting around 17 to 18 hours everyday. I work out in the mornings every weekday at 7 am and I break my fast at around 1 pm with a protein shake. I then wait 30 minutes before having my lunch and then I take another protein shake in the afternoon with a big snack. I think it’s just a matter of consuming sufficient calories, protein, nutrients etc within your eating window and getting sufficient rest. Honestly, I doubt taking protein a few hours is going to affect you that much, not unless you are a professional athlete or bodybuilder.
You do not have to eat immediately post workout.
While fasted, the body ramps up human growth hormone production to protect the muscle that it has.
Also the body still will use body fat after it’s used up the glycogen stored in the liver and in the muscles.
Example I’ll use my situation, fasting from 6pm to 12pm the next day. Wake at 5:15 a.m. and do my fasted workout. Then go to work, and then at noon we eating something.
But your body won’t go catabolic right after exercising if you’re fasted, unless you’re extremely underweight and have 0% body fat.
I’d reccomend the workout towards the end of my fasting window that way you could eat something whether it’s a handful of hours later or an hour or two later.
Black unsweetened coffee is my morning go to, I can only handle about two cups and that’s it for me, just water after that and plenty of it to keep the body functions going and fight off brain fog and muscle cramps.
Keep the mind focused and you’ll get there
You say below that you have a high body fat percentage so essentially you want to drop fat and add lean muscle. You don’t have a huge amount of actual weight to lose. So you need to lose the weight in a controlled way to make sure you don’t lose any muscle mass. In the past have you gained and then lost weight in rapid ways? Or have you just slowly gotten to this point?
Either way the goal is to do that slow loss that allows your body to recompose without forcing too much quick loss. So a small deficit below you TDEE. You want to slowly take off that fat weight while protecting any other muscle tissue. You should look at it as a slow process. While you could generate quick loss on a scale the number isn’t important and you could actually see an increase in weight initially as you gain a bit as you recompose on the way down. SoThe scale number isn’t going to be all that important for you and could cause you to push harder then you should which will cause the quick manufactured loss that you don’t want. You want real change and that will come slowly over time. So you can also do things like take pics and measurements if you want to track progress.
So this is just a long term consistent change that will take time to implement. Fixating on scale numbers will make you nutty as they only tell one story and so you have to take a much longer approach.