Anton YefanovWhat is TDEE?
TDEE, or total daily energy expenditure, is the number of calories your body burns in a day: resting metabolism, digesting food, everyday movement and exercise added together. Eat that many calories and your weight holds steady, which is why TDEE is also called your maintenance calories.
What makes up your TDEE
Basal metabolic rate (BMR), the energy that keeps you alive at rest, is the largest part: usually 60 to 70% of the total. Digesting food (the thermic effect of food) takes about another 10%. The rest is movement. Planned exercise is often smaller than people expect, around 5 to 10% for most lifters, because an hour of lifting burns a few hundred calories at most. Non-exercise activity (walking, standing, fidgeting, chores) is the part that varies most between two people of the same size, by several hundred calories a day. That is why this calculator asks for your steps.
TDEE vs BMR
BMR is what you would burn lying still all day. TDEE is BMR plus everything you do on top of it. Eating at your BMR is not a sensible diet target: it is a cut of 30 to 45% for most active people, steep enough to cost muscle, training quality and sleep. Diet against your TDEE, and treat BMR as a floor you stay above.
How TDEE is calculated
First estimate BMR from your body, then multiply it by an activity factor. The calculator works in kilograms and centimetres and converts pounds and feet first.
| Formula | BMR in kcal a day |
|---|---|
| Mifflin-St Jeor (men) | 10 × weight + 6.25 × height − 5 × age + 5 |
| Mifflin-St Jeor (women) | 10 × weight + 6.25 × height − 5 × age − 161 |
| Katch-McArdle | 370 + 21.6 × lean body mass |
| Cunningham | 500 + 22 × lean body mass |
| TDEE | BMR × activity factor |
Weight and lean body mass are in kilograms, height in centimetres, age in years. Lean body mass is weight × (1 − body fat % ÷ 100).
Activity multipliers
These are the five standard factors. The steps and sessions inputs above produce a value on the same scale, from 1.2 up to about 1.78.
| Activity level | Multiplier |
|---|---|
| SedentaryDesk job, little exercise | ×1.2 |
| Lightly activeExercise 1 to 3 days a week | ×1.375 |
| Moderately activeExercise 3 to 5 days a week | ×1.55 |
| Very activeHard exercise 6 to 7 days a week | ×1.725 |
| Extremely activePhysical job plus hard training | ×1.9 |
Why steps and sessions instead of an activity level
Most TDEE calculators ask you to pick sedentary, moderately active or very active. Lifters tend to pick too high: four hard gym sessions feel very active, but they add roughly 0.1 to the multiplier while a desk job and 4,000 steps keep the baseline near 1.2. This calculator sets the baseline from your daily steps and adds 0.025 for each weekly training session, so a lifter who trains four times a week and walks 8,000 steps lands on 1.5 instead of guessing between 1.55 and 1.725.
Which formula should you use?
Without a body fat measurement, use Mifflin-St Jeor. A systematic review comparing the common equations found it the most likely to land within 10% of measured resting energy in healthy adults, which is why it is the default here. If you know your body fat with some confidence, Katch-McArdle is usually the better fit for lifters: it works from lean mass, so it does not underrate a muscular 90 kg lifter or overrate a less muscular person of the same weight. Cunningham also uses lean mass but runs higher, and tends to suit very lean, very muscular athletes. A body fat number from a bathroom scale can be off by 5 points or more, and a wrong body fat makes the lean mass formulas worse than Mifflin-St Jeor, not better.
How accurate is a TDEE calculator?
For most people, a formula estimate lands within about 10% of their real TDEE, so 200 to 300 calories either way. Most of the error comes from the activity factor, not the BMR formula. The fix is not a better formula but your own data: eat a consistent, tracked amount for two to four weeks, weigh yourself every morning, and compare the weekly averages. If your weight held, you ate at maintenance. If it moved, each kilogram is roughly 7,700 calories of surplus or deficit spread across those days. The From your log tab does that sum for you.
Working out TDEE from your own log
Track everything you eat for at least two weeks, ideally four. Average the daily calories.
Weigh yourself each morning, after the bathroom and before eating. Average the first week and the last week.
Subtract the first average from the last to get the change in kilograms.
TDEE = average intake − (change × 7,700 ÷ days tracked). A loss makes the second term negative, so TDEE ends up above what you ate.
How to use your TDEE to cut, maintain or bulk
To lose fat, eat below your TDEE. A pace of 0.5 to 1% of bodyweight a week is the range most often recommended for lifters who want to keep their muscle, and slower is easier to sustain. To build muscle, eat a little above it: about 0.25 to 0.5% of bodyweight a week for newer lifters, less for experienced ones, since a bigger surplus mostly adds fat. Whatever the goal, set protein first, then let the scale tell you whether the number is right. Recalculate after every 5 kg (10 lb) or so of change, because a lighter body burns less.
Maintenance calories by bodyweight
Ready-made tables of TDEE by height, age and activity level, with cut and bulk targets, for one bodyweight at a time.
Men, lb
Men, kg
Women, lb
Train for the numbers too
Calories set the direction; training decides whether the weight you lose or gain is fat or muscle. Track your strength alongside the scale.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good TDEE?
There is no good or bad TDEE. It is a measurement, not a score. A bigger, taller, younger or more active person burns more. For adults it typically runs from about 1,600 kcal a day for a small, inactive woman to 3,500 or more for a large, active man.
How is TDEE calculated?
Estimate BMR with a formula such as Mifflin-St Jeor (10 × weight in kg + 6.25 × height in cm − 5 × age, plus 5 for men or minus 161 for women), then multiply by an activity factor between 1.2 and about 1.9.
Is TDEE the same as maintenance calories?
Yes. Your TDEE is the number of calories that keeps your weight stable, which is what maintenance calories means. The two terms are used interchangeably.
Should I eat back the calories I burn exercising?
Not if you used this calculator. Your training sessions are already part of the activity factor, so eating back what a watch says you burned would count them twice. Fitness trackers also tend to overestimate exercise calories.
Why is my TDEE different on other calculators?
Calculators use different BMR formulas and different activity multipliers, and those multipliers are where most of the spread comes from. Two estimates a couple of hundred calories apart are both reasonable. Your logged intake and weight trend settle which one is right for you.
How many calories below TDEE should I eat to lose weight?
A deficit that loses about 0.5% of bodyweight a week is a sound default, which works out to roughly 300 to 600 kcal a day for most adults. Larger deficits lose weight faster but make it harder to hold on to muscle and keep training well.
Does lifting weights increase TDEE?
A little directly, through the sessions themselves, and a little over time, because muscle burns slightly more than fat at rest. The bigger effect is indirect: lifting helps you keep muscle while dieting, so your TDEE drops less as you lose weight.
Does TDEE drop when you diet?
Yes. A smaller body burns less, and many people move less without noticing when calories are low. Expect your TDEE to fall as you lose weight, and recalculate every 5 kg (10 lb) or so. If a cut stalls for two to three weeks, check your log before cutting further.
How accurate is the Mifflin-St Jeor equation?
In the systematic review that compared the common formulas, Mifflin-St Jeor predicted resting energy within 10% of the measured value for more healthy adults than any other equation. It is less reliable for very muscular or very lean people, where a lean mass formula with an accurate body fat % does better.
Sources
The formulas, energy values and targets on this page come from these papers.
- A new predictive equation for resting energy expenditure in healthy individuals
Mifflin MD, St Jeor ST, Hill LA, Scott BJ, Daugherty SA, Koh YO. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 1990;51(2):241–247.
The source of the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, the default BMR formula here.
- Comparison of predictive equations for resting metabolic rate in healthy nonobese and obese adults: a systematic review
Frankenfield D, Roth-Yousey L, Compher C. Journal of the American Dietetic Association. 2005;105(5):775–789.
Compares the common BMR equations against measured values and favours Mifflin-St Jeor.
- A reanalysis of the factors influencing basal metabolic rate in normal adults
Cunningham JJ. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 1980;33(11):2372–2374.
Shows lean body mass as the strongest single predictor of BMR. The source of the Cunningham equation.
- Quantification of the effect of energy imbalance on bodyweight
Hall KD, Sacks G, Chandramohan D, Chow CC, Wang YC, Gortmaker SL, Swinburn BA. The Lancet. 2011;378(9793):826–837.
Models how a calorie surplus or deficit turns into weight change, and why TDEE falls as weight is lost.
- Evidence-based recommendations for natural bodybuilding contest preparation: nutrition and supplementation
Helms ER, Aragon AA, Fitschen PJ. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. 2014;11:20.
Recommends losing 0.5 to 1% of bodyweight a week, with high protein, to keep muscle while dieting.
- A systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression of the effect of protein supplementation on resistance training-induced gains in muscle mass and strength in healthy adults
Morton RW, Murphy KT, McKellar SR, Schoenfeld BJ, Henselmans M, Helms E, et al. British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2018;52(6):376–384.
Finds the benefit of protein for muscle gain levels off around 1.6 g/kg a day, with 2.2 g/kg as a generous upper bound.