How hard is it to go vegan?

The objection

“It’s too much. New shops, new recipes, reading every label, working out protein, I don’t have the energy to overhaul my entire life.”

The answer

It is a real change, and both the research on habits and a survey of people who quit put the hard part at the start. It is often a smaller rebuild than it looks, too. Plenty of ordinary food is vegan already or one swap away, such as porridge, pasta in tomato sauce, bean chilli, dal, vegetable curry with rice, stir-fries, soup and baked potatoes, so you keep that repertoire and change ingredients: oat or soya milk for cow’s milk, a plant spread for butter, lentils or plant mince for minced beef.

How long until going vegan feels easier?

Probably a few months: a 2024 review of 20 health-habit studies by Singh and colleagues put the usual time for a new habit to become automatic at two to five months, though the habits its studies timed were less to learn than a whole new diet [1]. In the two studies that reported a median, each volunteer took on one daily eating, drinking or exercise routine, and the medians were 59 and 66 days [1][9][10]. The 59 days, from a healthy-eating study, counts only the people who got there, just 23% of its participants [1][9]. Two other studies reported averages of 91 to 154 days, and individuals took anything from 4 days to 335 [1].

The authors found that complex behaviours such as regular healthy eating made smaller gains in habit strength than simple ones like flossing or drinking water, and they warn that short studies may underestimate how long habits take to form [1]. How often a behaviour is repeated is one of the things that sets how strong the habit becomes [1], so the slow, label-reading shops of the first weeks should give way to knowing what you buy. Cravings tend to fade in a similar way: a 2018 review, drawing mostly on weight-loss trials, found that cravings for particular foods fell as people ate those foods less often [2].

Why do so many people give up?

The reason quitters gave most often in a 2014 US survey was the food itself, and many had given up within months. Faunalytics, an animal-advocacy research group, found that about 2% of people aged 17 and over in the US were vegetarian or vegan [3][4] and about 10% had been and stopped [4], so 84% of those who had ever been vegetarian or vegan had given it up [3]. Of those, 34% had lasted three months or less and slightly more than half less than a year [3]. Among the 908 whose reasons could be coded, 32% were unsatisfied with the food, 26% gave health, 13% social problems, 13% inconvenience and 6% cost, and many gave more than one [3]. Many had switched too quickly, weren’t socially involved with other vegetarians or vegans, or couldn’t deal with particular cravings [4]. The survey counts vegetarians and vegans together.

Most of that can be planned for. If the food is the problem, the answer is a handful of meals you would happily cook again; if it is health, dietitians’ professional bodies in the UK, Canada and the US agree that a well-planned vegan diet can meet your needs. The UK’s British Dietetic Association (BDA) said in 2021 that carefully planned plant-based diets “can support healthy living at every age and life stage” [5], Dietitians of Canada (2020) says anyone can follow a well-planned vegan diet, from children to older adults [6], and the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ 2025 position is that appropriately planned vegan diets can be nutritionally adequate for adults [7]. B12 is the one nutrient plants can’t supply, so it has to come from fortified foods or a supplement, the BDA says [5]. In the UK, where dairy and seafood are the main sources of iodine, the BDA warns that people on fully plant-based diets may run short, and suggests an iodine-fortified plant drink or a supplement of no more than 150 micrograms a day [5][11]. Too much iodine is harmful as well, so the BDA advises anyone taking a supplement to speak to a dietitian [5], and the iodine answer covers the detail and what applies in other countries. The NHS advice to consider a vitamin D supplement in autumn and winter is for everyone in the UK, vegan or not [8].

None of it has to happen at once. Switching too quickly was common among the survey’s quitters [4], and the 2024 review found that habits people chose for themselves tended to be stronger [1], so begin wherever suits you, perhaps with breakfast or the dinners already one swap away, and sort out B12 from the start.