I should also add on a personal note that fasting truly is a humbling tool to highlight my own inequity. Especially for people like me that live in an affluent western country. Fasting enforces the empathy for those that are forced to fast out of impoverished circumstances by feeling true hunger and denial of wants, at least when following the preconcilar fast. 

It makes almsgiving  and charity that much more personal when I realise how much I have been given, from others and God, and how much I squander, during fasting St Basil the Great's homily against the rich and selfish rings true in my own life, as my affluency when not shared with others, is theft against the poor. It also magnifies St John the Baptist's words of how we must decrease in order to bring greater glory to Christ our Lord. 

I wish the great spiritual gift of ascetic praxis was not hidden away in the corners of the Latin Church, for me it is a gift that begets many gifts.