How to Go Vegan: The Part Nobody Talks About

3 juni 2026Nae Vegan Shoes

Most guides to going vegan start with what to eat and stop there. Swap the beef for lentils, find a milk alternative you like, done. And food is genuinely the biggest part of it — we'll get to that. But if you've spent any time thinking about veganism, you've probably already noticed that what you eat is only one piece of the picture.

Your shoes. Your wallet. Your jacket. The belt you've had for years. The cosmetics on your shelf. None of these come with the same clear labelling as a pack of bacon, but they're part of the same decision. And for most people, that part of the transition gets no guidance at all.

This is the guide we'd want to have read at the beginning — honest, practical, not overwhelming. Food first, then the rest.

Why people go vegan (and why it matters to know your reason)

Before the practical stuff, it's worth spending one minute on this. People arrive at veganism from different directions: animal welfare, environmental impact, health, or some combination of the three. Your reason shapes the order you do things, how strict you want to be, and how you talk about it with people around you.

There's no wrong reason, and there's no single correct pace. Some people make the switch completely in a week. Others take months to transition gradually. Both approaches work. What tends not to work is trying to do everything perfectly from day one and burning out on it.

The most useful framing: veganism is a direction, not a destination you either reach or fail to reach. Every step genuinely counts.

The food part: what actually matters

There are two big misconceptions about vegan nutrition. The first is that it's nutritionally incomplete and you'll be exhausted all the time. The second is that you can eat anything as long as it doesn't contain animal products and you'll be fine. Both are wrong.

A thoughtful vegan diet is nutritionally complete and — for many people — an improvement on what they ate before. A lazy vegan diet, built mainly on processed substitutes and white carbs, is not. The difference comes down to a few fundamentals.

Protein: more variety than you think

Protein is usually the first concern people raise, and it's the least founded one. Plant-based foods contain plenty of protein — the key is building meals around a variety of sources rather than relying on one. The main ones worth knowing:

Tofu (~16g protein per 100g): Made from compressed soy milk with a mild, neutral flavour that takes on whatever you cook it with. Firm tofu holds its shape in stir-fries and grills; silken tofu blends into sauces and soups. One of the most versatile proteins in a vegan kitchen.
Tempeh (~20g protein per 100g): Fermented soy with a firmer texture and nuttier flavour, plus the added benefit of probiotics for gut health. Excellent sliced and pan-fried, crumbled into sauces, or used in sandwiches.
Seitan (~25g protein per 100g): Made from wheat gluten — the densest plant-based protein source and the closest thing to a meat-like texture. Note: contains gluten, so not suitable for everyone.
Legumes (~15–18g protein per cooked cup): Lentils, chickpeas, black beans, kidney beans. The backbone of most well-functioning vegan diets. Also high in fibre, iron, and complex carbohydrates — they keep you full. Building a meal around legumes is probably the single most useful habit to develop early.
Hemp seeds, edamame, quinoa: Worth having in regular rotation. Easy to add to existing meals and help round out your amino acid profile without any particular effort.

A note on protein combining: older nutritional guidance said you needed to carefully combine proteins at every meal. More recent research shows that plant proteins can easily meet your amino acid requirements when you consume a sufficient quantity and variety of foods throughout the day — no need to calculate combinations meal by meal.

A note on calories

This catches some new vegans off guard: plant-based foods vary enormously in calorie density, and the same 100g can mean very different things depending on what you're eating.

100g firm tofu ≈ 75 kcal · 100g cooked lentils ≈ 115 kcal · 100g cooked chickpeas ≈ 160 kcal · 100g seitan ≈ 110 kcal · 100g mixed nuts ≈ 600 kcal

If you're trying to lose weight or manage your calorie intake, this matters. A bowl of legumes and vegetables is filling and relatively low in calories; a bowl of mixed nuts and tahini is not, even though both are entirely plant-based and nutritionally solid.

Conversely, if you're very active or find yourself losing weight unintentionally in the early weeks, increase calorie-dense whole foods: avocado, nut butters, olive oil, legumes in larger quantities. It's surprisingly easy to eat a lot of volume on a plant-based diet and still be in a calorie deficit, especially if your meals are mostly vegetables and grains without much fat or protein anchoring them.

The practical rule: think in terms of satiation, not just ingredients. If you finish a meal and you're hungry again in an hour, something is probably missing — usually protein, fat, or both.

Macro balance: what actually catches people out

Most new vegans eat too many carbohydrates and not enough fat and protein in the early weeks. This is partly because plant-based cooking is carb-heavy by default (pasta, rice, bread), and partly because it takes time to build the habit of reaching for protein sources that require more preparation.

At each meal, ask whether there's a meaningful protein source on the plate. Not a side dish of protein — an anchor. Legumes, tofu, tempeh, seitan, hemp seeds, edamame. If the answer is no, add one. Healthy fats matter too: avocado, olive oil, nuts, seeds, and nut butters. They keep meals satisfying and help absorb fat-soluble vitamins.

A word on processed vegan food

The growth of vegan substitutes — plant-based burgers, vegan sausages, dairy-free cheeses — has made going vegan more accessible than ever. These products have their place: useful during the transition, helpful in social situations, and some are genuinely good.

But they're not the foundation of a good diet. Many are high in sodium, heavily processed, and low in the fibre and micronutrients that make a plant-based diet beneficial. The goal isn't to replace every animal product with a vegan facsimile — it's to build meals around whole foods that are naturally plant-based: vegetables, legumes, grains, nuts, seeds, fruit. Use the substitutes as a bridge. Let real food be the destination.

The nutrients that need active attention

Vitamin B12 is not reliably available from plant foods — supplementing it, or eating B12-fortified foods regularly, is non-negotiable. Vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, iodine, iron, zinc, and calcium are all manageable through diet and fortified foods but worth monitoring, especially in the first year. Getting baseline blood work done after a few months is a sensible thing to do.

The part most guides skip: what you wear

Food is visible. Every meal is a decision point. But what you wear is more invisible — it sits in your wardrobe, and unless something prompts you to look at the label, you probably don't think about it daily.

The reality is that a significant portion of the fashion industry uses animal products: leather, suede, wool, silk, down, cashmere, shearling. Most of it is in plain sight. Some of it isn't — linings, adhesives, dyes. A shoe can look entirely synthetic and still have a leather insole. The good news is that this part of the transition doesn't need to happen all at once. Nobody expects you to throw out everything you own. The more useful approach is to make different choices going forward — and to know what to look for when you do.

Leather and its alternatives

Leather is the most common animal material in clothing and footwear — and arguably the most misunderstood. The industry's most persistent myth is that leather is simply a by-product of the meat industry, making it somehow neutral. It isn't. The global leather goods market is worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and in 2020 alone, global production included the skin of over 1.4 billion animals. Demand for leather exceeds what the meat industry produces as a side effect, which means animals are raised and killed specifically for their hides.

Every year, over a billion animals are slaughtered for the leather trade — cows, calves, goats, pigs, and others — many of them having endured the full conditions of industrial factory farming: extreme crowding, unanesthetized mutilation, and cruel treatment during transport and slaughter. The environmental damage continues after the animal dies: tanning requires heavy use of toxic chemicals including chromium salts and formaldehyde, contaminating water and soil near tanneries — primarily in China, India, and Bangladesh — where most of the world's leather is processed.

The alternatives have improved dramatically. Materials like Piñatex (made from pineapple leaf fibre), apple leather, cork, and OEKO-TEX certified microfibre are used by brands that take the material question seriously — not as compromises, but as genuinely better options for durability, water resistance, and environmental impact. At NAE Vegan Shoes, we've been building footwear from these materials since 2008, verifying every component — upper, lining, sole, adhesive — is entirely animal-free. When buying footwear, check all three sections of the EU label: the upper, the lining, and the sole. Animal materials can appear in any of them.

Wool, silk, and down

These are the materials that tend to surprise people. There's a widespread assumption that wool is harmless because the sheep aren't killed. The reality is more complex.

Wool production involves routine mutilation of lambs without pain relief: ear punching, tail docking, and castration are standard practice across the industry. In Australia — which produces around 25% of the world's wool — lambs undergo a procedure called mulesing, in which large sections of skin are carved from their backsides, often with no anaesthetic. Sheep in Australia undergo over 50 million such operations a year — procedures that would constitute cruelty if performed on dogs or cats. When sheep are no longer productive, they're sent to slaughter. The wool in a cosy jumper has a longer and harder story behind it than the label suggests.

Silk is even less visible in its cruelty, partly because silkworms are so far from the animals most people think of. The process is straightforward: silkworms spin their cocoons and are then boiled or gassed alive inside them so the thread can be extracted without the emerging moth breaking the filament. Approximately 6,600 silkworms are killed to make every kilogram of silk — and at global production scale, estimates suggest between 420 billion and 1 trillion silkworms are killed annually.

Down — the insulation in winter coats and jackets — comes primarily from geese and ducks raised in the meat and foie gras industries. Live plucking, in which feathers are pulled from conscious birds, is documented across the supply chain. Synthetic fill alternatives — recycled polyester, Tencel, organic cotton — perform equally well in most applications and are now widely available from mainstream brands.

The social part: the thing people underestimate

Going vegan changes some social dynamics, at least temporarily. Meals with family, dinner with friends, the colleague who makes a comment every time you eat lunch. This is genuinely one of the harder parts, and it tends to catch people off guard.

The honest summary

Going vegan is not as hard as it's sometimes made to sound, and not as simple as it's sometimes made to look. Food is the biggest adjustment, and it takes a few months to build the habits and find the meals that work for you. The rest — what you wear, what you buy — can be approached gradually.

The most important thing is to start, and to keep going when it's inconvenient. Because it will be inconvenient sometimes. That's not a reason to stop — it's just part of what it means to make choices that reflect what you actually believe. Take it lightly when you can. Nobody expects perfection, and the vegan who makes people curious does more good than the one who makes people defensive.

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