The Catholic Church doesn't have many rules about fasting, besides a few extra rules during the season of Lent.
This doesn't mean that fasting isn't important, just that Catholics are not bound to always fast in the same way.
Saints, for example, fasted in a variety of ways. Some saints existed on bread and water for days at a time, while others would fast from all food until the evening.
Others fasted by only eating potatoes, while others would simply not eat any meat.
The key to all fasting is not the specific types of food avoided, but in the spirit that is behind it.
Accepting the food you are given
One alternative to traditional fasting is eating precisely what you are given.
This may not seem like a very difficult thing to do, but sometimes it is our selfishness that needs to be most addressed. We may always want our food prepared a specific way, or only eat a short list of food that we enjoy.
If we aren't clinically allergic to a food we dislike, there should be nothing holding us back from eating it.
St. Francis de Sales encourages this type of mortification in his book, Introduction to the Devout Life:
It seems to me that we ought to have in great reverence that which our Savior and Redeemer Jesus Christ said to His disciples, “Eat such things as are set before you.” To my mind there is more virtue in eating whatever is offered you just as it comes, whether you like it or not, than in always choosing what is worst; for although the latter course may seem more ascetic, the former involves greater submission of will, because by it you give up not merely your taste, but your choice; and it is no slight austerity to hold up one’s likings in one’s hand, and subject them to all manner of accidents.
This would mean that whenever you go to a restaurant, and the waitress gets your order wrong, you would simply eat what is placed in front of you without complaint.
Or if you visit someone's house, you eat everything they prepare for you, not picking and choosing what you like.
We often tell our children to eat what is given to them, but how often do we follow that same admonition for ourselves?
If you are looking for a new way to surrender your will to God, eat whatever is given to you and offer any suffering you endure to God.
