If you’re having issues with your hunger response, it’s almost certainly because you’ve simply eliminated meat from the meal, without replacing it with something nutritionally equal. Your hunger response is mediated by a number of food chemicals, which you’ve like never had to notice before because meat provides the appropriate ones automatically,
Solving it is easy—just eat protein (nuts, beans, etc) and fat (nuts, oil, peanut butter, etc.). That’ll hit you with the right stuff to replace what you’re losing with meat, and keep your stomach’s brain happy because it’s receiving the right chemicals.
People too often think vegetarianism is just a light salad at every meal. >_<
As a mostly-vegetarian person myself, I find this article’s primary moral point very unconvincing.
Yes, factory farms are terrible, and we should make them illegal. But not all meat is raised on factory farms. Chickens and cattle who are raised ethically (which can still produce decent yields, though obviously less than factory farms) have lower levels of stress hormones than comparable wild animals. We can’t measure happiness directly in these low-light animals, but stress hormones are a very good analogue for an enjoyable life, and we know that high levels are directly linked to poorer health outcomes (and thus likely suffering).
It’s simply not that hard to raise food animals in a way that makes them better off than wild animals, and so unless you’re strongly in the “reform nature” transhumanist strain, ethical animal farming is at least somewhat of a positive over not farming at all.
(I’m personally vegetarian by ecological reasons, and abstain from eating some animals due to moral compunction against eating things likely to be sentient.)