You don't have to eat meat to have healthy iron levels. Personally, I was really turned off by most protein sources in first tri - even eggs and cheese were a no go. I did eat some fish and seafood before I got pregnant. Otherwise, I had been a vegetarian for 20 years. But fish and seafood were also totally gross to me. Buttered bagels, fresh fruit and milk were about the only things I could consistently manage.
But there's no reason to eat meat just to get iron, especially if it doesn't appeal to you. There are lots of gentle iron supplements out there. Solgar does a great one, which I took with no problems. I'm otherwise sensitive to iron. Pregnacare vitamins, which have a non-gentle hard to digest form of iron, gave me such bad stomach pains they sent me for an endoscopy. This is when we were still WTT but I started on them 6 months before our TTC. It was terrible and I was so unwell. My GP tried me on all sorts of drugs for reflux and stomach ulcers and finally the endoscopy which didn't show anything. I traced back on the calendar to exactly when the pain started (I remembered it was the Tuesday after some friends came to stay with us for the weekend). It turns out I'd started taking the vitamins that Saturday. I stopped them right away and I felt fine within a week. So for me to say that there are forms of gentle iron out there, that's saying something.
Floravital is also great and you can take it daily along with whatever vitamins you already take. It's the high potency version of Floradix with I think 19 mg of iron per day. You can also take Spatone. When I was anaemic, I took them 3 times a day with meals along with a tablet of 500mg of vitamin C. Even if you don't take the Spatone, taking vitamin C at each meal will help you with iron absorption, including absorbing non-haeme iron from vegetable sources. I'm not sure where you're located and these are all UK brands, but you'll find the same, just you need to figure out what it's called. A trip to your local health food store or vitamin shop would be a start.
When I was pregnant, I took the Solgar tablets, plus vitamin C at each meal and my iron was 13.9 and 12.1. I did become anaemic postnatally though and I took high potency iron (200 mg tablets) plus Spatone and 500 mg of vitamin C 3 times a day and that brought my iron up in about a week. So you really can do a lot with supplementation and continuing with a vegetarian diet if you can't cope with anything else. There is also this thing called a Lucky Iron Fish, which I have but haven't tried yet. It's basically just that, an iron fish you put in your pot when you cook and it releases small amounts of digestible iron into whatever you're cooking. So even if you aren't cooking something high in iron, you can add iron to the cooking liquid or broth to up your iron intake.
If you do want to eat meat for the added iron, make sure you eat the most iron rich sources. Beef and lamb are good, as are certain shellfish like clams, mussels and oysters, not so much for fish or poultry. And definitely avoid hot dogs, besides being terrible for you, they don't really have much iron. But there's also loads of iron in things like chickpeas or lentils or green leafy veg, which your body can absorb in sufficient quantities if you eat enough of it and have it with added vitamin c.
