The Great Lent. As part of your catechumenate, all of you either have or will experience the Great Lent in its entirety prior to your admittance into the Church. The Great Lent (called this because the Nativity Fast and other fasts during the years are sometimes called the “lesser” fasts) was originally the period of fasting for catechumens who were preparing to receive Holy Baptism, but it swiftly became a time for all Christians to prepare for Christ’s Resurrection. It should be a time of devotion, prayer, fasting, repentance, and almsgiving, and if we’re already doing all of these things it should be a renewal of them and a deepened concentration on them as part of our Lenten journey. While the abstention from a bunch of food items is probably the most immediate take away, the real focus should be on closer attention paid to our private devotions which ought to be said more often through the fast. The Fathers described fasting without prayer as “the fast of demons” because demons neither eat nor pray.
There is also something of a liturgical fast during this time, as our usual Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom gets swapped out with the more solemn Divine Liturgy of St. Basil - the latter will seem much the same to you in the nave but perhaps a little longer - it’s main difference is in the much longer priest’s private prayers, which you should take time to read at some point. We also have during this time the Divine Liturgy of St. Gregory the Dialogist, Pope of Old Rome, also called the Presanctified Liturgy, in which the Lamb portion of the Communion consecrated the Sunday before is used in an evening Liturgy on Wednesdays and Fridays. Because the fast is a bit stricter during the Great Lent, it is expected that this evening Holy Communion will be the first food you partake in on those days.
So unlike the West, we fast… then fast a bit longer. In the West, Sundays are “mini-Easters,” not counted as part of the 40 days so the fast is off and meat, eggs, cheese, etc. are eaten; we in East loosen the fast on Sundays during Lent to include wine and oil, but that’s it. We also include Sundays in the count toward 40 - we start on Monday 7 weeks before Pascha and stop on Lazarus Saturday (the day before Palm Sunday)... then we keep on fasting another (Holy) week. The Great Lent is something to be looked forward to rather than dreaded, and is a good experience to speak to your sponsor about.