TDEE Calculator

TDEE is your maintenance level: eat that many calories and your weight holds steady. Everything else in nutrition planning is measured as a distance from it.

What makes up your TDEE

Total daily energy expenditure has four parts, and they are not equally famous:

The surprise for most people is how small the exercise slice is and how large NEAT is. NEAT varies between individuals by up to 2,000 kcal a day, and it falls silently during a diet — you move less without noticing. That single mechanism explains a great many stalled fat-loss phases.

Choosing an activity multiplier honestly

The multiplier is the weakest link in the calculation, because it is self-reported. Research consistently finds that people overestimate their activity and underestimate their intake. Some calibration:

• 1.2 — sedentary. Desk job, drive everywhere, under 5,000 steps a day, no structured training. More people belong here than claim to.
• 1.375 — lightly active. One to three moderate sessions a week, or a job with some standing and walking.
• 1.55 — moderately active. Three to five real training sessions a week plus reasonable daily movement, around 8,000–10,000 steps.
• 1.725 — very active. Six or seven sessions a week, or a genuinely physical job such as construction or nursing.
• 1.9 — extremely active. Manual labour combined with training, or twice-daily sessions. This is an athlete's number, not an enthusiastic amateur's.

If you fall between two, take the lower one. An estimate that is slightly conservative gets corrected quickly by the scale; one that is too generous just produces confusion about why nothing is changing.

Turning TDEE into a calorie target

A kilogram of body fat stores roughly 7,700 kcal, so a daily deficit of 550 kcal predicts about half a kilogram of loss per week. The arithmetic is sound; the biology is messier, because metabolic rate drifts down as you lose weight and NEAT falls with it.

Sensible bounds: aim for a deficit of 10–25 % of TDEE. Below that, progress is too slow to measure against daily weight noise. Above it, you lose disproportionately more lean mass, training quality collapses and adherence tends to fail. For gaining, a surplus of 200–350 kcal is enough to support muscle growth without adding unnecessary fat.

Recalculating as you go

Treat the output as a hypothesis to test, not a prescription. Eat at the target for two to three weeks, weigh yourself under the same conditions each morning, and compare weekly averages rather than individual days — daily fluctuations of 1–2 kg from water, sodium and gut contents are normal and will mask the trend.

If the weekly average has not moved in three weeks, reduce intake by about 10 % or add deliberate movement, then reassess. Recalculate your TDEE after every 5–7 kg of weight change: a lighter body costs less to run, and a target that was right at the start will be too generous later.