Peer review is a sanity check, but many incorrect theories disproven later passed peer review. I only point out science as a the one group of people who should be above appeals to authority or consensus but they are still very influenced by it.
I think the major problem with plant-based proteins is they are coupled with carbohydrates in abundance. To hit your protein goals you typically get a large amount of sugar, which it causes a large amount of insulin, leading to the hormonal problems I indicated above.
So to recap, you're doing a vegetarian diet, you have great success with it, but you're undermuscled. You want advice on which foods to help you build up your muscles? Your lifestyle is very active, and you get lots of resistance exercise at your job.
Your already doing the most important thing to stimulate muscle growth, you say your getting enough protein, so I think the next place to look is at your hormone levels.
Down thread you say you can eat eggs? Eat more eggs by themselves, i.e. not within 4 hours of other food. Each egg is 6g of bio complete protein. Mixing eggs and plant based foods will reduce the absorption of the egg itself.
I've seen people have good success not trying to eat more, but eating a carnivore or very low carb diet and adding in resistance exercise. The body will naturally hunger for the proteins to build more muscle as long as the muscles get challenged regularly
Things to stimulate muscle growth (anything where your muscles feel a little sore at the end)
physical activity
walking
weight training
swimming
Hormones can have a massive impact on your body composition, if you have a doctor get your hormonal panel done. Eating low carb food will help your body's hormones get back into balance. High carb/sugar filled food messes with the super hormone insulin and that can keep you off balance.
Dont eat high sugar foods just to pack on fat, you want to build your natural muscle for a healthy lifestyle. If you must stay plant based you could explore plant based keto https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/keto/vegetarian
Make sure you map out your food intake, at least once, in a micronutrient tool like cronometer and ensure your hitting all the targets
If you're young, don't have any other medical issues, are undermuscled, and have low energy - it sounds like a hormonal issue. Probably it can be resolved with a better diet.
Sure, they are pretty niche: https://hackertalks.com/post/7986045 - The take away from this paper is after a 6 week adaption phase a keto athlete had a higher time to exhaustion then a high carb athlete even with carb loading.
https://hackertalks.com/post/7986695 - Here is the good one, looking at oxidation of HC vs LC - the available energy comes from fat (hence not needing to carb load)... The smoking gun though... look at the sustained VO2Max levels....
That is so much more energy available!
https://hackertalks.com/post/7987142 This paper shows better energy utilization in 5km runs, but importantly no disadvantage vs high carb runners. This paper introduces the theory that the runner bonk/wall is not running out of energy but a dip in blood glucose, which a low carb athlete will not experience.
sane glucose supplementation has been very effective in high energy output activities.
That's a really interesting area of active research. There are some really compelling papers that fat adapted athletes do not need to carb load. get the same performance. If you're interested, I can dig up those papers for you. The issue is full fat adaptation can take 6-12 weeks for people, so most of the short term studies don't see the differentiation. This does not give the fat athletes an advantage in raw power, except they don't hit the wall. There was one paper showing higher vo2 Max sustained for longer, which is quite interesting
Food Glucose is not healthy for humans in any circumstance. Humans can produce glucose from fat and protein in a process called gluconeogenesis. no external sugar is required. In fact the human body does not store glucose, the only glucose is in the blood, and then only five grams. Any excess glucose is converted into fat. Excessive glucose drives high insulin levels which drive insulin resistance who causes most long term health issues: high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, PCOS, ed, etc
Fructose is worse then glucose, as the above papers indicate: by itself it causes fatty liver disease, increased insulin resistance, accelerated tumor growth, it metabolises using the same pathways as alcohol.
Why do you have the urge to down vote?