TDEE Calculator

BMR is the burn at complete rest; TDEE is your whole day — BMR plus movement, exercise, fidgeting, and the energy cost of digesting food. TDEE is the number diet targets are built from, because it's what you'd eat to stay exactly the same weight. The multiplier between them ranges from 1.2 (genuinely sedentary) to 1.9 (physical job plus hard training), which is why two people with identical BMRs can have needs 800 calories apart.

Count what you actually do, averaged over a real week — not the gym schedule you intend to keep. A desk job with 2–3 workouts is 'light'; 'moderate' means most days include deliberate exercise; 'very active' is nearly daily hard training. Choosing one level too high inflates the estimate by 200–400 calories, which quietly erases an intended deficit — the single most common reason 'eating at a deficit' doesn't produce results.

Treat it as a well-informed starting point with roughly ±10% uncertainty — equations predict populations, and you're one person with your own metabolism and your own honesty about activity. The reliable procedure: eat the maintenance number for three weeks, weigh daily, average weekly. Weight flat means the number's right; drifting up or down means adjust by 100–200 and repeat. Three weeks of your own scale data beats any formula.

Below roughly 1,200 calories (women) or 1,500 (men), getting adequate protein, micronutrients, and enough food to sustain training becomes genuinely difficult without medical supervision — so this calculator caps cut targets at those floors rather than printing a number that shouldn't be followed. If the cap kicks in for you, the workable levers are a gentler deficit, more daily movement (which raises TDEE), or both.