TDEE Calculator

TDEE is the single most important number for nutrition planning. It tells you how many calories your body actually uses each day — accounting for your resting metabolism, physical activity, the energy cost of digesting food (thermic effect of food, about 10% of calories), and all the incidental movement you do throughout the day (NEAT — non-exercise activity thermogenesis).

The activity multipliers used here (1.2 for sedentary through 1.9 for very active) are validated against doubly-labeled water studies — the gold standard for measuring actual energy expenditure. Most desk workers fall between 1.375 and 1.55. Very few people legitimately qualify as "extra active" (1.9) unless they are competitive athletes with multiple daily training sessions or workers in physically demanding trades.

Real-world TDEE can differ from calculated values by 10–20% in either direction. The best approach is to use this calculator as a starting point, eat at the calculated TDEE for 2–3 weeks while tracking consistently, and then adjust by 100–200 calories based on actual weight changes. This produces a personalized, empirically-verified TDEE for your body.