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Your own post contradicts your claims.
For your fairly low body weight, you need to be laser focused about your nutrition to avoid being deficient. Even then, you struggle to meet protein needs for anyone who prefers a bulkier-aesthetic. You eat foods that do not fit into any culinary tradition. Require a ton of time to plan around and are expensive. ( though I'll grant you that invisible subsidies makes it hard to calculate what part of it is an illusion).
I have a life ?
Let me flip that around for you. What is your excuse for adopting a lifestyle as limiting as veganism when there are other options that achieve the same goals with far less compromise?
IMO, Veganism doesn't work because it is absolutist. Veganism doesn't work because vegans are more interested in being vegan than helping animals of any kind. The need for complete eradication of animal products makes it a culture war issue, rather an a productive discussion about reducing animal exploitation.
A lot of Asian cooking can be done with minimal of use of animal products. Indian, Chinese, Thai.... the list goes on. Vegans could have used their massive marketing machine to push a change in that direction, reduced animal suffering by 99% (the last 1% being use of ghee, cream, oyster sauce, fish sauce, shrimp paste, etc), and gotten closer to their goal instantly. But they didn't. Hell, I suspect the vegans didn't go vegetarian because a bunch not-cool Indians were already vegetarian and there was no cultural cachet to be gained from vegetarian grandstanding.
Veganism is fairly arbitrary too. If pesticides are necessary for plant food, then what's wrong with eating cousins of those pests ? If vegans are alright with genociding cockroaches & slugs, then what are their ethical issues with eating shrimp & snails? If vegans are alright with genociding rats, then why can't we eat rabbits ? Why is honey not vegan ? Vegans support modern medicine and pesticides. So clearly, rats are the globally accepted intelligence bar for genocide. Based on that, Climate change is not a good enough excuse for veganism, because chicken + fish are dumber and quite sustainable.
I know a lot of vegans and I don't judge them. Afterall, people avoid food for arbitrary reasons all the time. (Hindu-beef, Muslims-pork, etc). But some will claim to have moral superiority for it, and can't stop talking about it. I scoffed at the Jains in school who used to chastise me for killing mosquitoes and I scoff at any vegan who has issues with me eating meat.
I was more or less going to post this. "Not actually that hard" is incompatible with obsessively tracking micro-nutrients. That is way beyond what an average person is willing to do. Eating without any nutritional deficiencies as a vegan requires a wall of text to keep track possible sources of nutrients you actively have to seek out. Eating without any nutritional deficiencies as an omnivore requires have a palate more refined than a five year old.
It also seems like claims of being "successful athletically" on a vegan diet are primary made by participants in endurance sports. While I can appreciate those sports, this is somewhat outside of the average mental picture for athleticism. Outside of the niche of endurance sports most people think of power, muscularity, or strength when they think of athleticism. A vegan diet is also pretty clearly not optimal, even for endurance sports. I don't follow marathon closely enough to know if this has changed since
2011
It's clearly possible to sustain life as a vegan, but success athletically has to be defined before you claim to have proven that possible to be successful athletically on a vegan diet.
Just a heads-up, you replied to the wrong comment.
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Dude, I have a life too. I honestly don't think about this crap 99% of the time, except when eating out a restaurant or arguing on an internet form. I only tracked my intake for this post. If I wanted to bulk I would use protein powder like 99% of meat eaters, or make a serious effort to include more protein rich foods like soy.
I agree with some of your points. I'm not sure why the line is at animals when it's pretty clear that things like oysters are basically plants. There's a difference between those edge cases, and something that's clearly as smart as a human baby like an octopus or a pig.
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