Lent before one of the most significant and important church holidays - Easter - for many becomes a serious test. In the old days, the Church demanded its strict observance. Moreover, the post covered virtually all spheres of life. It was impossible to arrange balls, attend theaters, strict abstinence in sex life was prescribed. But basically for the average person, “fasting” meant a change in the usual diet. What can not be eaten during Lent, a man has known since childhood and, to one extent or another, has observed the prescribed rules all his life.
The attitude to the post in our time is somewhat different. The churches are truly fasting, and for most people it is abstinence from protein, fatty, sweet food.
Indeed, that you can’t eat in fasting is food of animal origin: meat (in any form), lard, offal (liver, kidneys, heart, lung), milk and dairy products, dishes prepared on their basis, fish, eggs, butter - butter and vegetable. All fasting days you can not drink alcoholic beverages.
These are general recommendations, but the post lasts seven weeks, each week and all days of the week have their own characteristics. The rules strictly determine that you can’t eat in a post precisely on this week and on this day.
The first week, the middle of the fast (fourth week) and the last week (seventh) are the most severe.
In these weeks, for five days you can eat only very simple, plant foods, without vegetable oil. These are bread, salted or pickled vegetables, mushrooms, dried or frozen berries, various pickles (cabbage, soaked apples), dried fruits, nuts. Food should be cold. These severe requirements are allowed to be violated only by patients, pregnant and lactating, young children, travelers. These exemptions are valid for all posts. You can drink a lot during fasting days: water, herbal tea, fruit drinks from berries, fruit decoctions, but cold and cooked without sugar.
In the second, third, fifth and sixth weeks on weekdays you can eat boiled food. It can be cereals cooked on water, potatoes, stewed (only on water) cabbage, lean vegetable soups. It is extremely rare to add vegetable oil to the dish. Three days a week (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday) you can eat steamed or boiled low-fat fish.
On Saturdays and Sundays, all days of Lent (except the last week), you can add fish and a little vegetable oil to the diet. Also, some concessions are permissible on the feast of the Annunciation and Palm Sunday (the last before Easter).
In the last week of fasting before the great holiday of the Resurrection, it is recommended to observe strict fasting on all days, and especially on Good Friday. What you can’t eat in fasting before Easter is boiled food, fish, vegetable oil, butter bread, you can’t drink warmed drinks. Only cold and dry food is prescribed. On Saturday before Easter, it’s better not to eat anything - until the first star.
In our stores now there are products that can diversify the lean table. These are seafood (shrimp, mussels, scallops, crab meat), they sometimes successfully replace fish. Sold lean mayonnaise (but it is in vegetable oil), lean cookies. Legumes are well compensated for protein deficiency: peas, lentils, chickpeas. Sometimes you can use soy products.
Knowing that you can’t eat in fasting, you can prepare in advance for a change in diet, make blanks. Pickled cucumbers and tomatoes, pickled and dried mushrooms, soaked apples, frozen or dried berries, roots and spicy herbs - all this is varied by a lean table. In the days when you can eat fish (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday), a fasting lunch and homemade canned vegetables are very good: caviar from zucchini and eggplant, bell pepper with rice and vegetables.
There are four posts in the year - the Great, Petrovsky, Uspensky and Rozhdestvensky. Many people know that you can’t eat in fasting and as much as possible observe it. But fasting is not only abstinence, it is also concentration, repentance, prayer.