TDEE Calculator

Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) is the total number of calories your body burns in a day — your resting metabolism (BMR) plus everything on top of it: walking, exercise, digesting food, and even fidgeting. It's the number that actually determines whether you gain, lose, or maintain weight at a given calorie intake.

This calculator first estimates your BMR using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, then multiplies it by an activity multiplier based on how active you typically are — a scale commonly used alongside both the Mifflin-St Jeor and the older Harris-Benedict equations. Someone who's sedentary multiplies their BMR by 1.2, while someone doing hard exercise most days multiplies by as much as 1.9 — a difference that can mean several hundred extra calories burned per day.

TDEE is your maintenance level: eating close to it keeps your weight roughly stable over time. Eating consistently below it tends to produce weight loss; eating above it tends to produce weight gain. Like BMR, TDEE is a population-average estimate, not a precise measurement of your individual metabolism — real day-to-day energy burn varies with sleep, stress, illness, and how accurately you've judged your own activity level. Recalculate it periodically as your weight or routine changes, and treat it as a starting point for adjustment rather than a fixed target.

A worked example

Take a 35-year-old man who weighs 80 kg, stands 180 cm tall, and is "moderately active." His BMR works out to 10 × 80 + 6.25 × 180 − 5 × 35 + 5 = 800 + 1,125 − 175 + 5 = 1,755 calories a day. Multiply that by the "moderately active" multiplier of 1.55: 1,755 × 1.55 = 2,720.25, which rounds to a TDEE of about 2,720 calories a day. If the same person were sedentary instead, the multiplier drops to 1.2: 1,755 × 1.2 = 2,106 — over 600 calories a day less, entirely from activity level, with body weight, height, and age unchanged.

A common misconception

People often treat TDEE as a fixed number rather than a moving target. It's calculated from your current weight, so as you lose or gain weight, your TDEE shifts too — a person who's lost 10 kg burns meaningfully less at the same activity level than they did before, which is part of why weight loss tends to slow down even when the plan hasn't changed. It's also easy to overestimate your own activity tier: most people who exercise a few times a week but otherwise sit most of the day fall under "lightly active," not "moderately" or "very active," and picking too high a tier is the most common reason a TDEE estimate runs high.

Where the estimate breaks down

TDEE formulas assume metabolism responds in a simple, static way to weight change, but the body adapts. A widely cited 2016 follow-up study of "The Biggest Loser" contestants, published in the journal Obesity, found that resting metabolic rate dropped by an average of 610 calories a day by the end of the competition — and was still roughly 700 calories a day below the contestants' original baseline six years later, even after most of the weight had been regained. This "metabolic adaptation" means a TDEE estimate calculated from your current stats can overstate how many calories you actually burn after a sustained diet, which is one reason long-term calorie targets often need real-world adjustment, not just formula math.

Using your TDEE

Treat TDEE as a starting estimate for your maintenance calories, then adjust based on what actually happens to your weight over 2–3 weeks of eating near that number. If your weight is drifting up or down at that intake, your real TDEE is different from the estimate — trust the trend on the scale over the formula. Recalculate periodically, especially after a meaningful weight change or a shift in your routine.

TDEE vs. BMR

BMR is the calorie floor — what your body burns doing absolutely nothing. TDEE is the full picture, adding activity, exercise, and digestion on top of that floor. The gap between the two can be large: in the example above, activity alone accounts for nearly 1,000 of the 2,720 total calories. Use BMR to understand your baseline; use TDEE for anything related to actually planning what to eat.