The importance of fasting

Today, I want to talk about fasting. I am not an expert in the topic, but I want to say a few things about it, as I am discovering its importance myself. The fasting that orthodox Christians do consists of a diet that is similar to the vegan diet. During fasting, food that contains meat, fish, dairy or eggs is not consumed. On some days, alcohol is not consumed either, which is one difference between the fasting diet and the vegan diet. Another difference is the fact that vegans do not eat honey and products that were made by animals themselves, while this is not the case for fasting.

Sometimes people have no idea why the church asks people to fast or they do it without knowing why they are doing this. For this reason, I decided to write this article. To begin with, there is a specific event that triggers this whole conversation about fasting. This is the fact that one day, the disciples of Jesus did not manage to treat someone who was possessed by demons. Jesus, instead, did this and the disciples asked Him why they couldn’t do it. He said that without prayer and fasting one cannot remove demons (Moulatsiotis, 2021).

So, basically, prayer and fasting are important for us to remove demons and this can mean something deeper than what we saw in this specific occasion. It can also mean to remove our sinful passions too, since there are demons behind many of them (Moulatsiotis, 2021). The church uses fasting as a method to combat our sins. It can also have other benefits, since it also benefits our health.

I am not sure very well how fasting works and can help us remove demons. I know only one thing about fasting that definitely plays a role in combating our sins. This is the fact that fasting actually makes people feel weaker because they have less energy than they could have, if they could eat more things. This feeling of being a bit weaker makes you have less energy to do sins that you would normally do. If someone swears at you, you have less energy and desire to have a fight with this person. When the fasting before Easter starts there are 3 days, for example, when some monks decide to eat no food at all (Moulatsiotis, 2019); if you go on day 3 and swear at the monk, he feels so weak that he likely has no desire to reply anything to you. This is an extreme example since few people decide to stay for 3 days without eating and the church doesn’t require people to do this. However, this is a perfect example to illustrate the power of fasting and benefits that it has.

Another thing that I found interesting about fasting is that we should see it as an act of love towards God. It is like saying “I love you God and for this reason I decided to make a sacrifice for You”. Fasting is an act of love and this is something that I find wonderful. Finally, fasting has other components except for avoiding certain foods too. In particular, during fasting we should also do an active attempt to restrict our sins. We should do an attempt to also restrict e.g. how much we judge people or not treat them well etc. This is very important, since we are trying to combat our sins. Our aim after every fast should be to have become better people and less sinful than we were before.

All in all, fasting is important since it is necessary to remove demons and we need it to remove many sinful passions that we have. This is why it is crucial to use this as a method during our repentance.

References

Moulatsiotis, N. (2019). What is the power of fasting?. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KBZFNtLWII [Accessed 21 October 2022].

Moulatsiotis, N. (2021). Fasting removes our passions. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-uXu3NLHFo [Accessed 21 October 2022].