Fitness

One of the best places to start is to look at what vegetarian recipes create "complete" proteins. These are proteins with the nine essential amino acids that our bodies can't create and therefore need in order to function and actually absorb and use protein properly. Without complete proteins, you lose muscle while still eating regularly. More importantly, you need complete proteins for organ function, energy storage, etc.

Meat, fish, eggs - these are handy dandy protein sources because they contain all nine essential amino acids and are complete proteins on their own. But you totally can swap them out for vegetarian meals and still get a strong serving of complete protein through combos.

More often than not, you'll find incomplete vegetarian protein sources that contain some of the essential amino acids, but not all required for protein synthesis. However, with a vegetarian protein combination chart, you can start to see combinations of vegetarian proteins that combine their amino acids together to provide all nine. Beans and rice, for example, is a big survival tool since it's cheap and easy to make. By themselves they each lack a few amino acids, but together they form a complete healthy protein -- beans provide some of the amino acids and rice provides the rest. As long as you find a complete protein combination that you like, you've got a good replacement!

There are some vegetarian options that are complete proteins by themselves, like tofu, but since you're not too keen on tofu then it's best to find combinations of what you do like. Check out this protein combination chart and look at the kinds of foods you do like. Eating less meat doesn't mean you need to punish yourself, make sure what replacement protein sources you go with are things you actually enjoy!

One last note: there are some vegetarian proteins that contain all nine amino acids by themselves but still lack enough of one or two of them to technically count as a complete protein source, so make sure you check that they contain adequate amounts of all nine amino acids if going with a standalone option instead of just checking to see if have some of all nine.