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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.