I’ve been vegan for 18 months & it’s transformed my health. I was the last person I thought would go vegan.
I went into it for entirely selfish reasons - I wanted to see if my health & pain would improve. I didn’t care at all about animals (that changed later).
I weight lifted for 7 years eating lots of meat, fish & dairy, and my personal experience is I’m stronger, recover faster & have crazy strength endurance on a whole foods, organic vegan diet.
I also dropped about 15 pounds of body fat in the first 5 or 6 weeks - something which I now attribute to no longer eating all the estrogens, chemicals & rubbish in factory farmed meat and dairy.
Fat dropped off me.
I now do boxing & Muay Thai + a few compound weights to assist that, about 14 hours a week.
My experience was the first 2 weeks after going vegan my muscles flattened out, but then my body suddenly adapted & my muscles were more full than when I was eating meat etc.
Personally I don’t take any supplements - I might take B12 and/or creatine.
I’ve experimented with being fussy about protein combining (rice + beans etc) and also not worrying about it - and for me it makes no difference. I just eat a varied whole food diet & my body combines what I eat in a day, week etc to build muscle.
I was the last person I thought would go vegan, I was entirely converted to eating animal products. I went vegan to see how it’d improve chronic pain. All the performance improvement was a total surprise!
Another surprise was how clear & calm I felt mentally - that happened very quickly - within 4 days. I remember the day that kicked in & saying to my girlfriend “I feel serene, like unbelievably calm”
Gnarly aggression & irritability I used to feel a lot went away. I now see that as common sense - the conditions of factory farming & the animal suffering fill the meat with adrenaline & cortisol… and guess where that goes when you eat it.
That’s been my experience, and I could recommend loads of documentaries to watch, but the best way to find out is just to give it a try for 2 months & find out for yourself.