Clinician-guided weight management
TDEE
Calculator
Find your Total Daily Energy Expenditure, the calories you burn maintaining your current weight plus what it takes to gain or lose at a steady pace.
BMR & maintenance
Calories to maintain your current weight
cal / day
Estimates only, based on standard formulas, not medical advice. Individual needs vary; a licensed provider should evaluate your plan.
Learn
What is TDEE?
Total Daily Energy Expenditure — TDEE — is your best estimate of how many calories your body burns in a single day, from everything it's doing at once, not just deliberate activity.
What it's made up of
It's made up of three pieces:
- Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). The calories your body burns just to keep itself running: breathing, circulating blood, regulating temperature. This is the baseline, and it's shaped by your age, sex, height, and weight.
- Activity Level. Everything beyond rest. That splits further into intentional exercise (going for a run, hitting the gym) and the countless small movements throughout your day you don't think of as "exercise" — walking around the house, fidgeting, standing up. Both add up.
- Thermic Effect of Food (TEF). Digesting food itself costs energy. Interestingly, this varies by macronutrient: protein takes noticeably more energy to break down than fat or carbs do.
How it's calculated
At its core, the formula is simple:
TDEE = BMR × Activity Multiplier
Your BMR gets scaled up based on how active your day-to-day life actually is — the more you move, the higher that multiplier climbs.
Why it matters for your goals
TDEE is the number everything else is built on. Once you know it, the math for any weight goal becomes straightforward: eat below it to lose weight, eat above it to gain, eat right around it to maintain.
That said, knowing the number is only half the equation. Hitting a calorie target consistently matters, but so does what you're eating, how active you stay, how well you're sleeping, and whether you're keeping up with hydration — none of those show up in the TDEE formula itself, but all of them affect whether the results actually hold.