I'm a vegetarian who doesn't eat cheese or eggs either. No fish, poultry or meat. I've done three caminos so far and in truth, each time I've dropped a good 5 to 8 kgs, and I'm not heavy to start with
That said, what I do is try to buy avocados whenever possible, tomatoes, and if I'm lucky, if I'm walking near a larger grocery store, I stock up on hummus. At home, I'm a big bread eater, but on the caminos, except in Galicia and parts of Portugal, the bread is, well, nothing to write home about. Each of my caminos, I
almost , but not quite, swear off my bread habit. Nuts, of course, are de rigueur, as are fruits, anything I grab my hands on, whether from a tree, vine, or a grocery.
One very cool experience worth telling about is that I was somewhere between Lisboa and Porto, walking through a small village. I stopped into a small bar/grocery store, and the proprietor was a woman who spoke German, as I do. I asked her if she could make me a sandwich with veggies (typically, asparagus, mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, and no mayo (of course), but maybe mustard or ketchup (or tabasco sauce). She told me her daughter was also a vegetarian, and then she pulled out some soy burgers from her fridge and made me three of some of the best sandwiches I ever had.
This past year, in Luarca, I had a great experience too. I stopped into a bar/restaurant in the morning for some coffee and asked - as usual - if they could fix me up a couple of veggie bocadillos. Turns out the waitress was a vegan and she fixed me two or three veggie meals to go - gratis!
One other great experience this past year ... I was in Llanes and had a couple of avocados in my backpack. I went to the back of a moderately upscale restaurant and went to to the back to the kitchen asked if I could borrow a knife to cut my avocados. The lady in the kitchen turned out to be from the Dominican Republic, and I, being from New York, could totally relate. She insisted on cutting the avocados for me, and even lent me a plate, fork and spoon to eat them with. Behind the restaurant was a small plaza, with a few benches. I went back there and started munching away at my meal (naturally with bread, again), when someone tapped me on the shoulder and handed me three tuna sandwiches and two bottles of juice. Before I could say anything, the person, a young man, said, "Yo soy Domincano" and walked away - I didn't even have the chance to thank him. Although I couldn't eat the tuna sandwiches, that was one of the highlights of my last camino - courtesy of some great fellow Western Hemisphere natives!