TDEE Calculator

BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is the energy your body burns at complete rest — just keeping your heart beating, lungs breathing, and cells running — as if measured fasted and motionless. TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) takes that baseline and multiplies it by an activity factor to account for everything else you do in a day: digesting food, walking, working, and any deliberate exercise. TDEE is always higher than BMR, and it's the number that actually tells you how many calories you burn — and therefore need to eat — in a normal day.

Mifflin-St Jeor estimates BMR from your total body weight, height, and age using population averages — it has no way to know how much of your weight is muscle versus fat. Katch-McArdle instead uses your lean body mass (total weight minus fat mass), which is a more direct driver of resting metabolism since muscle tissue burns more energy at rest than fat tissue. For someone with an average build the two formulas land close together; for a very lean or very high-body-fat person, Katch-McArdle is generally considered the more accurate of the two — which is why entering a body fat % switches the calculator's main TDEE result over to it.

It's a reasonable default for most active adults trying to preserve or build muscle, sitting within the range commonly used for people who strength-train regularly. If you're sedentary, much leaner or heavier than average, or manage a medical condition, your ideal protein intake can differ meaningfully — treat the macro table as a starting point to adjust from rather than a fixed prescription, and check with a registered dietitian if you have kidney disease or another condition where protein intake needs closer management.

The BMR formulas here are statistical averages built from population studies, so any individual can land 5–10% above or below what the equation predicts, and the activity multiplier is a rough category rather than a measured number — two people who both call themselves "moderately active" can burn quite different amounts of energy. Treat the result as a starting estimate, track your actual weight trend over 2–3 weeks at that calorie level, and nudge the target up or down based on what really happens on the scale.

No — the activity multiplier you select already folds your typical exercise into the TDEE estimate, so the number this calculator gives you is meant to be your full daily target, workouts included. Adding exercise calories on top of that, the way some fitness trackers encourage, usually double-counts the same energy and can stall progress toward a cutting or bulking goal. If your training load swings a lot week to week, it's more reliable to pick the activity level that matches your typical week than to adjust the target daily.

Most people without a structured exercise routine who sit for most of the workday fall into "Sedentary" or "Light," even if they feel generally busy — a job that keeps you on your feet but isn't exercise still counts as light, not moderate. Reserve "Very active" and "Extra active" for people training hard most days of the week or doing physically demanding work. When in doubt, pick the lower of two options and adjust after tracking your actual weight change for a couple of weeks, since overestimating activity is the single most common reason a calorie target doesn't produce the expected result.