From the first, fasting was practised in the church for similar reason.
In this season fasting played a part, but it was not universally nor rigorously enforced.
Fasting is frequent and severe.
Your body has been in fasting mode for approximately eight hours while you were sleeping.
The king consents, the saint is acclaimed, the bodies of the thirty-seven martyrs solemnly interred, and the king, after fasting five, and listening to Gregory's homilies for sixty days, is healed.