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I did give it a shot when I was living with vegan roommates... turns out my health declines noticeably when I try. I do hope vegans and people like myself can find common cause around shifting away from factory farming of all types rather than trying to solve the problem by shifting diets alone.
I hate to admit it but this is the exact reason I stopped being vegan too. I'd just start feeling weirdly faint like I was about to pass out randomly. You know when you're in an elevator and there's a slight gravity shift when it stops at a floor? It was like that every now and then

Fully loaded up on the multivitamins and as far as I knew I was getting in everything I needed to get in food wise. I do realise that it's on me to make sure that I'm actually eating the right food to not die, it's not something for other vegans to have to fix for me, but I just couldn't figure it out quickly enough myself and had no resources to reference

I'm down to about ~10% meat but I'm just going to accept that I'm sitting in the moral wrong on this until the nutritional alternatives ramp up in options and down in price

e: I really should note that I'm allergic to most types of beans, which took out a fair chunk of the vegan diet on its own. I couldn't see anything that only beans provided when I tried to fix it though. Gave it a good 6 months overall but not for me (yet?)

I'm not an expert but that sounds like a lack of calories to me. Vegan food can be very low in calories and you might have to eat more volume.

I'm lacoto-ovo vegetarian and I have to take specifically an iron supplement to keep my levels up. Multivitamins weren't enough. I also have a genetic condition that interferes with iron absorption, so YMMV.

>I'm down to about ~10% meat but I'm just going to accept that I'm sitting in the moral wrong on this until the nutritional alternatives ramp up in options and down in price

Don't sweat it too much, perfect is the enemy of good; everyone can only do their best. I'd ideally be vegan, and I was one for about a year, but right now lacoto-ovo is what works for me... (it's been 20 years since I ate meat.)

> I hate to admit it but this is the exact reason I stopped being vegan too. I'd just start feeling weirdly faint like I was about to pass out randomly. You know when you're in an elevator and there's a slight gravity shift when it stops at a floor? It was like that every now and then

I just posted my own anecdote about this before I saw your comment, but just to reiterate, my ex encountered the exact same symptoms while on a vegan diet.

RE: your edit.

It’s going to be very difficult to sustain a vegan diet without having a substantial level of bean consumption, due to the poor quality of protein you’d be getting from the rest of your diet. Another possible issue could have been iron. You noted taking a multivitamin, but mineral consumption would just as likely been your main issue.

My wife and I have been eating vegan food during weekdays and then non-vegan during the weekends. I've found that for me that has been the best balance. The reason we started was for health reasons: All things equal, the normal amount of vegetables that we ate before was pretty small. We got a couple of easy vegan cookbooks and it has been quite good.

Another advantage for us is that, as a nutritionist friend told me, sometimes people eating Vegan find it difficult to consume their required daily calories. So, it translates in to having to eat "a lot" of vegan food, to get into the 1600 daily calorie intake for me. I've lost several Kilos since we started around 4 months ago.

My total daily energy expenditure averages around 2900 kcal. It's hard to imagine how I could eat that much on a vegan diet without making myself sick.
Tons of info and bodybuilders in here https://reddit.com/r/VeganFitness/best
I wish that was the case for me! I gained weight by going vegan, all those cashews and coconut milk add up. I’m definitely an outlier though.
Not all vegan diets are alike. What yours like, out of curiousity?
I don't remember the particulars any more, I know I was eating more peanut and nutritional yeast than before but I couldn't give you a detailed breakdown of my diet at the time.
My ex was vegan (most of the time; she would switch back and forth between vegan and vegetarian often) and she would go through times when she would experience extreme fatigue, nausea, faintness, etc.

Eventually I noticed this coincided in particular with the times she would be full vegan for a week or two at a time (though it still happened less frequently otherwise).

I did some research and discovered there are several key vitamins / minerals that you get from meat and dairy very easily but is almost (or totally?) impossible to get without supplementation if you’re vegan. So I bought her a multivitamin and the symptoms subsided substantially, though not ever completely.

Just going on gut instinct here but I personally refuse to undergo a diet that without external supplementation does not properly nourish the body with everything it needs. If our ancestors were vegan, I’m not sure we’d all be here today - and if we were I’m not sure we’d like the state we were in, especially if other societies moved away from the vegan diet.

(I’ve noticed most vegans tend to be… not very robust, shall we say. I think the world notices this too fortunately, which is why vegan will remain a fringe diet.)

You realized that most of the vitamins we get from a meat-based diet are in the food because we feed the multivitamins to the animals? It is just an unnecessary layer of indirection added.

It turns out that people who earn a living with producing meat are just a lot better to making sure their livestock gets everything they need (nutrition wise) than people who just eat stuff when they are hungry. If some professionals would create proper vegan diets and force feed it to us you can be sure there would be no deficits.

> You realized that most of the vitamins we get from a meat-based diet are in the food because we feed the multivitamins to the animals? It is just an unnecessary layer of indirection added.

How does that work, I wonder? Did ancient humans first start feeding their domestic animals multivitamins because they realised there weren't enough in meat? Do modern sub-saharan pastoral nomads feed their domestic animals multivitamins to avoid deficits?

Or is yours a statement that only applies to a restricted geographical locality and practice of meat production? What do you think?

I am of course talking about the meat you and I eat. Ancient cultures did have different bodies, different food source access, higher quality food probably, or, you know, most probably not the healthiest bodies of all time. After all they died at like 30 years old.
> I am of course talking about the meat you and I eat.

Are you? How do you know what meat I eat? For example, I don't live in the US and I don't eat beef (I find it tasteless and I prefer mutton which is also traditional to my local cuisine). As far as I can tell, the animals I eat aren't given multivitamins and I don't even understand why that would be necessary.

I think you're generalising from your experience with meat in your country to the rest of the world without really being very well aware of what goes on in the rest of the world: how people eat and how they raise their animals. Perhaps that's something to think about before talking of what "we" do.

There is a lot of planet Earth outside the place you live, you know?

The _average_ life expectancy was 30 but that's because loads of children died at a young age. If you made it past your teens your life expectancy was that way higher.