Only two days out of the entire year does the Church call us to obligatory fasting and abstinence in honor of Jesus’ suffering and death for us and for our salvation: Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
Fridays during Lent also are obligatory days of abstinence.
The law of abstinence requires Catholics older than 14 years of age to abstain from eating meat on Fridays in honor of the Passion of Jesus on Good Friday.
The law of fasting requires Catholics between 18 – 59 years of age to reduce the amount of food eaten from normal. The Church defines this as one meal a day, and two smaller meals which if added together would not exceed the main meal in quantity.
Of course, the Church understands and permits these disciplines to be relaxed. Besides those outside the age limits, the sick, the frail, pregnant or nursing women according to their nutritional need, manual laborers according to need, guests at a meal who cannot excuse themselves without giving great offense or causing enmity and other situations of moral or physical impossibility to observe the penitential discipline.
As with every spiritual discipline, obligatory and voluntary: why we are doing it matters.
