Your Total Daily Energy Expenditure is an estimate of how many calories you burn per day — at rest plus activity. It's the starting point for any fat loss, maintenance, or muscle gain plan. Calculated with validated equations, not guesswork.
Please fill in age, height, and weight to calculate.
Fill in your details and hit calculate — your numbers will appear here.
No black box here — two steps, both from peer-reviewed research.
Your basal metabolic rate is the energy your body burns at complete rest — keeping your heart beating, brain working, and cells repairing. It's the largest share of your daily burn for most people. This calculator uses the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, which validation studies have found to be the most reliable of the common BMR formulas. If you enter your body fat percentage, it switches to the Katch-McArdle equation, which estimates from lean body mass — more accurate if you carry more muscle than average.
BMR is then multiplied by an activity factor (1.2 for sedentary up to 1.9 for athletes) to account for movement, exercise, and even the energy cost of digesting food. This is where most error creeps in — people tend to overestimate how active they are. When in doubt, pick the lower level.
Any equation is an estimate for the average person of your size — your genetics, muscle mass, and daily movement shift the true number. That's why the results page says "starting point": eat at your estimated maintenance for two to three weeks, watch your weight trend, and let real-world data correct the math.
mifflin et al., 1990 · katch & mcardle, 1996 · frankenfield et al., 2005Knowing your TDEE is step one. Turning it into a training and nutrition plan you can actually stick to — that's what I do with my clients, in Los Angeles and online worldwide.