What Is a TDEE Calculator?
TDEE stands for Total Daily Energy Expenditure - everything your body burns in 24 hours. A TDEE calculator estimates that number from your size, age, sex and how active you are.
TDEE, BMR and calories are not the same thing
- BMR
- what you burn lying still all day. Breathing, circulation, keeping warm.
- TDEE
- BMR plus everything else: walking, working, digesting, training.
- Calorie
- the unit all of this is measured in. Not a number you have, a unit you count.
BMR is always the smaller number. For most people TDEE lands somewhere between 1.2 and 1.9 times BMR, which is exactly what the activity factor represents.
What the number is actually for
- Maintain - eat around your TDEE.
- Lose fat - eat under it. A deficit of roughly 10-20 percent is a common starting range and is slow enough to keep muscle.
- Gain - eat above it, by a smaller margin than most people assume.
Every one of these is a starting point, not a prescription. Predictive equations carry real error for any individual, so the honest workflow is: calculate, eat at that number for two to three weeks, then adjust from your actual weight trend.
Get your number
The calculator shows every step of the equation rather than just the result, so you can see where your number comes from.