My diet is roughly 40% protein, 35% fat, 25% carbs. It’s extremely high in protein as I’m on a 20% calorie deficit, aiming for at least 1.2g protein per lb lean body weight, 35% fat preferring it to carbs and making up the remaining calories with carbs. I prefer fat over carbs as my body hangs on to carbs and doing a metabolic test was told I would be better with higher fat to carb ratio based on my stats and goal of getting leaner while maintaining muscle.

I’ve been planning meals using linear programming with the Simplex algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_algorithm) to calculate the optimal ingredients/quantities to hit my macro goals while minimising total calories.

From playing about it’s impossible for me to hit my macro goals using a pure vegan/vegetarian whole food diet. To hit my protein goals my carb ratio would need to go way up and I’d then need to lower the fat percentage and even then I’d likely be in a caloric surplus. I could lower the protein proportion to try and hit the total calorie goal but then I’d likely be in a catabolic state and loose muscle mass.

I really wanted to eat less meat just for the fact meat costs more and as a plus eating less lowers my environmental impact. When plugging in the numbers with simplex it becomes very apparent it’s extremely hard to get the nutritional bang for your buck you get from meat. For the average person not interested in strength training or body fat percentage it’s probably not as big a deal but the fact remains it’s extremely hard to get specific macro targets without meat.

I did competitive powerlifting for a while and am still an avid stength trainer. I didn't go full vegan, but my wife did, and there for a time my diet mostly aligned to hers because she was doing the shopping while I was working. Overtime I started to get a lot of minor injuries out of nowhere. I tried doing a vegetarian diet and tried my damndest to get all the nutrients without meat. But after some time I always felt full but malnourished. It is hard to describe. I broke eventually and spent about 3 weeks eating some red meat every day until I felt like my normal self again. I still try to minimize my meat consumption, but I've definitely learned to notice a threshold where I need to supplement my doet with meat on occasion.

I fear that often the vegan community insists that these lifestyle changes are universally easy. It probably doesn't help that many of the vegan activists make a part of their living by being vegan activists, which gives them flexibility to micromanage their diet. But for the gentleman at the lumber yard, it isn't so easy.

I'm excited to see cultured meat make some headway and hope the ventures in this space are successful. I've been watching for some time.

How is an example of doing a tail activity like competitive powerlifting and the anecdote of underperforming in the activity on a vegan diet relevant?

I am pretty sure that gentlemen at the lumber yard do not have 300kg deadlift events and are not competing.

It is well known that diet has very little to do with progress for an amateur athlete. Consistency is the biggest factor in long term success. If you want to eek out the most out of your body, then you might want to optimize, but then you're already deviating to obsessive behavior.

Yeah, if you want to increase your squat by 20% short-term, you're going to have to eat more food and be obsessive about it, but if you're fine with consistent training over a span of 10-20 years, there's no reason to stress too much about diet.

When I hear people talking about diet and "optimal performance", I always wonder what the hell are they doing that they need to optimally perform. Like, what exactly is optimal performance of a sedentary programmer that maintains elasticsearch clusters? What, he feels tired sooner if he's on a vegan diet instead of something else?