You can always try fasting from 12noon until 12noon, that way you are really only fasting from 2 meals, and you are asleep for 8 out of the 24 hours of your fast, which makes it seem less severe.
Another really important thing about the discipline of fasting, which I personally struggle with, is the idea that when you are fasting, you fast for its’ own sake. That means you don’t want to be doing anything other than offering up your food to help you grow closer to God. Two implications of this: 1) you shouldn’t be thinking ‘I’ll lose weight and drop a dress size if I keep on fasting like this’ (in fact, your body’s fat-storing starvation reflex kicks in, so that’s unlikely anyway); 2) you shouldn’t pig out the day before or after to make up for the food you ‘lost’ while fasting - that’s always my biggest temptation.
It’s also worth remembering that the Church’s rules for fasting are that you are allowed one satisfying meal and two smaller intakes of food, so, for example, you could have a piece of toast in the morning, an apple at lunch and a one-course dinner when you get home, and still count that as a fast day. The idea is that you should be able to fast continuously for a long time, you can live on 1 meal a day for the whole of Lent if you need to, but you can’t live on nothing for more than a day or two at most.
That’s the fasting rules for the Roman Rite. The other thing that might interest you if you have trouble with total fasting is the Eastern Rites’ fasting practices. In the Eastern Rite, you can eat as much as you want, but no meat, dairy, fish, oil or spices. In other words, your diet gets pretty boring pretty quickly. That’s another way of offering up your food to re-orient your life towards God.
