Every body requires a certain amount of energy to maintain weight (neither lose unintentionally nor gain unintentionally) and to run its metabolic processes, replace old cells, continually renewing skin, muscles, etc, and to get the energy from food and use that energy to drive the overall system.
Assuming a person eats enough calories, but doesn't seem to get the amount of energy from that food that it is known to contain, (which is my guess on what you are asking), there are a couple of things to check into to try to figure out what is wrong. This is best done in consultation with a doctor. She can run tests to help figure it out.
The first thing to rule out is a nutritional deficiency. These are common in folks who do not eat a variety of foods from a wide variety of food groups. Vitamins and minerals are important co-factors for the reactions of all metabolic processes. For example, many reactions need NADH. It's made by your body from the B vitamin niacin or nicotinamide. So if you are deficient in niacin, that's going to be a problem. Other reactions use FAD. It's made by the body by a different B vitamin, riboflavin. So it's going to be a problem if you are deficient in riboflavin.
Further, many people decide to become vegetarian or vegan without doing any research and end up having deficiencies of several amino acids. The problem those degiciencies can cause, is due to how we are made biochemically, and how that differs from how plants are made.
A little biochemistry lesson. There are proteins in you and me and cows and soybeans and rice and essentially everything people might eat. Proteins are huge molecules made of chains of amino acids. There are twenty major amino acids used by every living thing on Earth to make proteins. Each of the twenty are needed by every living thing. But they are made and needed in different proportions. Of the twenty, human bodies can use a certain set of 9 of them to manufacture the other 11. But the human body can't manufacture the set of nine. Therefore, even though we use and need all 20, those 9 are absolutely essential to be in our diets, and, they have to be there in the proportions needed to make the 11, but also to have enough of each of the 9 left for when those are needed to be inserted into proteins made by the body (like muscles, bones, enzymes, organs, skin, etc.).
Animal products contain all the amino acids we need in the correct percentages to prevent deficiencies of any amino acids. Plant products contain amino acids, and we can use them, but, they are not present in most plants with all 20, and so those that have all 20 are called “complete”. Complete proteins are found in soybeans, quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth and perhaps a couple other plants.
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