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Comment by curiousDog | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Particularly going Vegan. What sorts of protein do you usually eat?

Lentils (any kind of beans/peas) and rice will give you complete proteins. When I was vegan (gave it up when I got married, like many things ;-) ) I didn't eat much tofu mainly because it has a huge amount of fat. I actually eat a lot more now that I'm not vegan.

Vegan is a bit challenging for nutrition because things like zinc are fairly hard to get. Although the UI is fairly poor, I recommend using nut [0] to help you calculate how you are doing. I haven't actually seen anything else even close for a nutrient calculator (which is strange since you would think it would be an obvious piece of software for people to write).

Also take this advice from the Vegan society on vitamin B12 [1]. There is a lot of dangerous information out there, so be careful.

I really enjoyed being vegan. Unlike many vegans, I was not an ethical vegan. I just like eating that way. I actually became vegetarian to save money when I was young and poor (meat or beer was an easy equation for me to solve). After a while, I just found that the foods I enjoyed the most and that made me feel the best were vegan. YMMV :-D

No reason to go crazy at first, though. Just start cooking vegan meals. If you become vegan full time, you'll be cooking a lot in most countries, so be prepared for it.

[0] http://nut.sourceforge.net/ [1] https://www.vegansociety.com/resources/nutrition-and-health/...

cronometer.com is an excellent and complete nutritional calculator. it calculates your individual amino acid requirements so you can get your complete protein for the day. your liver actually stores amino acids to form complete proteins so it doesn't matter if you eat incomplete protein one meal as long as your overall diet is balanced. complete protein is just a term for the amino acid makeup of human tissue, so technically the only complete protein out there would come from cannibalism.

Here are a couple of posts that I wrote when about my fitness routine and diet when I transitioned from being an omnivore to a vegan. Hope it helps even though I am not a great writer. Happy to answer any more questions too :)

https://medium.com/@manibatra23/2016-a-reflection-e80378393f...

https://medium.com/@manibatra23/2016-a-reflection-diet-30c15...

A lot of times when people ask this what they really mean is "Don't you get meat cravings?"

You do, but as your gut bacteria changes you sort of stop craving meat so much and start craving the new foods you've been eating.

FWIW, plant-based complete protein groups are fairly inexpensive and easy to come by.

Beans and tofu are the obvious ones. Stuff like quinoa and nuts are good too. Even green vegetables are good, you just need to eat a lot of them which you can because the calorie density is typically so low.

you can make really tasty tofu nuggets.

I can't stress this enough: learn how to cook tofu. I held off on being a vegetarian so long because I had a bad tofu experience, but I eat it 2-3 times a week now and I've grown to prefer over chicken. Fry it, braise it, bake it... there are a lot of options. Mushrooms are a similar story.

My diet is primarily: Rice, beans, tofu, mushrooms, and various greens. I've never really been a salad person, and even as a vegetarian that's still generally true.

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