I'm not super strict about it, so it ends up between 3000 and 3750 most days. The Soylent makes it a lot easier because you're not constantly eating. Even something as simple as using half and half instead of skim milk in your coffee adds up.
Edit: but yes, I work out quite a bit.
P.S. Good luck on a vegetarian diet with a 3500+ caloric intake. You'll be eating all day.
Nuts and nut butters make this very easy. Just 1/4 cup of almond butter, for instance, is over 350 calories.
I'm not a vegetarian but I have cut out a lot of meat and maintained a relatively high (3000+) daily caloric intake without any difficulty.
Almonds, walnuts and sunflower seeds.
It's kind of hard work eating 3500 calories of just meat, eggs and cheese. Whereas that amount of bread, pasta, sweets, and other nominally vegetarian foodstuffs can be easily wolfed down.
https://www.peta.org/living/other/vegan-bodybuilders/
You can definitely get 3500 calories per day on a meat-free diet, although it may take a bit more effort.
- Vegetarian food is really not that tasty in my opinion. (edit: the kind I can reasonably prepare myself)
- It's very difficult to eat enough vegetarian food for me to meet my Calorie requirements (I target 3500/day).
- Eating a balanced diet of vegetarian food that tastes half-decent requires a substantial amount of preparation, especially if you have carb/protein targets. Non-vegetarian pop-it-in-the-microwave food is plentiful. There just aren't enough hours in the day.
I stumbled along with this for years, trying and failing over and over. One of my best friends became a vegetarian and I watched as he basically dialed down his diet to peanut butter and lentils.
Last year, I unintentionally became mostly-vegetarian entirely by accident: I started drinking Soylent. It's high-Calorie, it's consistent, there are five different flavors (three with caffeine!), each flavor tastes decent enough, and it's not a pain in the ass. Other than the odd takeaway order (two or three times a month, or if I run out of Soylent) effectively zero meat enters my apartment.
My coworkers have rolled their eyes dramatically, but it's pretty good. The bottles get recycled, they come unrefrigerated direct from the manufacturer, and the drinks are (seemingly) made from half-decent stuff. If my office put them in the lunch line, I'd probably stop eating meat at work, too.
(And they're pretty cheap!)