"We call that "abstinence" ... "fasting" means not eating (or at least eating in microscopic quantities). Those are two distinct disciplines."
Its a common misapprehension among Orthodox. When we speak of fasting we mean, if we are doing what we Greeks call a monastic fast, no meat, no fish with a backbone, nothing which comes from an animal like milk, cheese, butter or other animal fats, no oil and no wine. Its tough enough just to do without the meat. Anyway, abstaining from meat alone would not qualify as fasting for the Orthodox, hence Kosta's comment about "fasting" from meat alone being a Roman Catholic idea (by the way, your Eastern Rites fast the way we do). All in all, AB, you guys are real sissies when it comes to fasting! :)
abstaining from meat alone would not qualify as fasting anybody that I know of ... If you insist on misidentifying our relatively mild discipline of abstinence from meat with our much more strict discipline of fasting, you're going to cause confusion and misunderstanding.
As for 'sissies' ... whatever. Catholics don't fast or abstain in order to prove how 'manly' we are. That would be a sin of pride and of 'self-esteem'. We do it (among other things) as a mortification of the flesh; a way of allowing God to draw us away from the things of this world.
I'm sure your real reasons are similar ...