Bulking season for the newbie vegan

[The Clean Bulk]

Hey Y'all! I'm a new member on here and newly vegan! The reason I'm transitioning is I find myself very sluggish at times, minor depression issues, and I also recently discovered I have heart issues (AFib)!
Now hearing that description you might not think I'm living a healthy life style, but I actually try my best to be healthy. I'm still young, I regularly go to the gym, and I eat what I thought was a rather healthy diet. I don't do drugs, I rarely drink, and I even cut out caffeine and sodas years ago.
A couple months ago I started trying to gain more weight because I've been hovering around 180 for years. Like I said, I go to the gym regularly and I've also been trying to increase the weight I lift. So I started going to the gym more and eating more often, especially eating meat. That was all cut a little short when I started experiencing the symptoms of AFib right around when I finally hit 200 lbs.
All the tests and x-rays and ultra sounds they ran said I was very healthy, nothing I was doing should be causing it and there were some other underlying issues that we'd have to look into. Like I said I like living as healthy as I can and I started looking into new ways. A lot of things pointed me to veganism.

So TL;DR :
I am new to this and I'm trying to find a way to eat healthier on a vegan diet. I'm also wanting to continue my progress in the gains department. I'm looking for help on meals and snacks on the higher protein and calorie end. Also Foods that I can prep in bulk for meals through the week.
(Also I'm not looking very for replacing/substituting meats and cheese, not to big on tofu.)

I appreciate any help in advance and I look forward to a happier, healthier life style!

 

[R.L Hawk]

I also ultimately made a transition because of depression. I'd definitely say YouTube should be your friend right now, there's all kind of vegan youtubers. I love Cheap Lazy Vegan and Edyn Jaks (?) is different from the standard cookie cutter vegans. Meatless spaghetti and banana nice cream also make great friends.

 

[Jamie in Chile]

Vegan is definately worth a try for you for health reasons alone based on what you say. I am not the right person for muscle build on a vegan diet. If no-one replies (it can be quiet here) do a search on the forum, google and you tube. There are definately people posting info on this that can help!!

 

[callador]

I've written a few things on this forum as a competitive powerlifter. For a clean bulk I would look to gain maybe 1# per week. This means you have to add 500 cals per day above your maintenance for 200#. If you don't know what that is, try tracking it for a couple of days to get a baseline.

For macros, I have been using the following with great success. I may actually hit lifetime PR's at my meet coming up in December, and I took a year off lifting before starting up 6 months ago. I've been vegan for about 4 months, so you can definitely add size and strength.

Protein- .8g to 1g per pound of lean body mass. I shoot for 1g per pound because I am maintaining weight and doing a slow recomp. Studies show on a bulk that could go lower with .8g. But this is based of lean body mass, so use something like the navy method to determine your starting body fat. Let's say you were 20%, then your lean body mass would be 160. You would shoot for 128g to 160g. I would probably just go for 160g in this scenario.

Fat- .3-.35g per pound of body weight. This would be 60g to 70g of fat.

So if the scenario holds true, you would be at 160g protein (640 cals) and 70g of fat (630 cals)- 1270 total cals.

Carbs- Use this to fill out the calories. Again, just throwing out hypothetical numbers, lets say you need 2500 cals to maintain your body weight right now. You would bump it up to 3000 and keep going from there. 3000-1270 = 1,730 cals for carbs. Divide that by 4 and you have 432g carbs.

These are just ballpark numbers, you could bump protein up more if you felt like it for instance.

You can eat really clean and hit these numbers pretty easily. Things like seitan, rice, veggies, beans, cerals, etc. will do the trick. I'm doing this pretty clean as well, and I am at 240g protein, 70g fat, and 750g carbs. I keep my fat a little lower for health reasons, basically the bear minimum.

 

[Donald]

B Complex and Sublingual B12 taken a few times a week should help with the sluggishness and depression.