What you can not eat in the post

Great post in front of one of the most important and important church holidays - Easter - for many becomes a serious test. In the old days the Church demanded its strict observance. And the post covered virtually all spheres of life. It was impossible to arrange balls, visit theaters, strict abstinence in sexual life was prescribed. But mostly for the layman, "fasting" meant changing the habitual diet. What you can not eat in Lent, a person has known since childhood and in one way or another all his life he observed the prescribed rules.

Attitude to the post in our time is somewhat different. The people who are vocalized really fast, and for the most part of the people this is abstinence from protein, fatty, sweet food.

Indeed, what you can not eat in a post is food of animal origin: meat (in any form), fat, by-products (liver, kidneys, heart, lung), milk and dairy products, dishes cooked on their basis, fish, eggs, Butter - cream and vegetable. In all fasting days you can not drink alcoholic beverages.

These are general recommendations, but the post lasts seven weeks, every week and all days of the week have their own characteristics. The rules strictly define that you can not eat in the post just this week and this day.

The first week, the middle of the fast (the fourth week) and the last week (the seventh) are the strictest.

In these weeks for five days you can eat only a very simple, vegetable food, without vegetable oil. This is bread, salted or pickled vegetables, mushrooms, dried or frozen berries, various sugars (cabbage, soaked apples), dried fruits, nuts. The food should be cold. These harsh demands are allowed to violate only the sick, pregnant and nursing, small children, travelers. These allowances are valid for all posts. You can drink a lot on days of strict fasting: water, herbal tea, fruit cocktails, fruit broths, but cold and cooked without sugar.

In the second, third, fifth and sixth weeks on weekdays, you can eat boiled food. These can be porridges cooked on water, potatoes, braised cabbage (only on water), vegetable soups. Very rarely allowed to add vegetable oil to the dish. Three days a week (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday) you can eat steamed or boiled lean fish.

On Saturdays and Sundays all the days of Lent (except for the last week) you can add to the diet fish and a little bit of vegetable oil. Also some allowances are allowed 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 on Good Friday - especially. What you can not eat in the post before Easter is cooked food, fish, vegetable oil, butter, you can not drink warm drinks. Only cold and dry food is prescribed. On Saturday before Easter, it is generally 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 (shrimps, mussels, scallops, crabs), they sometimes successfully replace the fish. Lenton mayonnaise is sold (but it is on vegetable oil), lean cookies. Well compensate for protein deficiency beans: peas, lentils, chickpeas. Sometimes you can use soy products.

Knowing that you can not eat in the post, you can prepare in advance for changing the diet, make preparations. Pickled cucumbers and tomatoes, pickled and dried mushrooms, soaked apples, frozen or dried berries, roots and spicy herbs - all this is a variety of lean table. In the days when you can eat fish (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday), they will decorate the lenten lunch and home canned vegetables: caviar from courgettes and eggplant, Bulgarian pepper with rice and vegetables.

In the year four fasts are Great, Petrovsky, Uspensky and Rozhdestvensky. Many know that you can not eat in fasting and as far as you can keep it. But fasting is not only abstinence, it is also concentration, repentance, prayer.