🔥 Calorie & TDEE Calculator

How to Calculate Your Daily Calories

1. Choose metric or imperial units.
2. Enter your sex, age, weight and height.
3. Pick the activity level that honestly matches your week.
4. Read your maintenance calories, plus targets for losing or gaining weight.
5. Use the macro breakdown as a starting point for protein, fat and carbohydrate.

What is the difference between BMR and TDEE?

Your Basal Metabolic Rate is what your body burns at complete rest just keeping you alive — heart, brain, breathing, temperature. Total Daily Energy Expenditure is BMR multiplied by an activity factor, and it represents what you actually burn across a normal day including walking, working and exercising. TDEE is the number to eat to if you want to maintain your weight; BMR is only a component of it and eating at BMR would create a large deficit.

Which activity level should I choose?

Most people overestimate. "Moderately active" means genuine structured exercise three to five times a week, not an intention to go. If you have a desk job and train twice a week, "lightly active" is usually closer to the truth. Choosing a level too high is the most common reason a calorie target fails to produce results — the calculated maintenance figure ends up several hundred calories above reality.

How fast should I lose weight?

A deficit of about 500 calories a day produces roughly half a kilogram or one pound of loss per week, which most health bodies consider a sustainable rate. Larger deficits work initially but are harder to maintain, tend to cost more muscle alongside fat, and often trigger rebound eating. Very low intakes — below roughly 1,500 calories for men or 1,200 for women — are flagged in the table above and should only be attempted under medical supervision.

Why does protein get its own target?

Protein preserves muscle while you are in a calorie deficit, and it is the most satiating of the three macronutrients, so it makes a given calorie budget feel less restrictive. The figure suggested here is around 1.8 grams per kilogram of bodyweight, which sits in the range commonly recommended for people who are training and losing weight simultaneously. Sedentary people need less; competitive athletes sometimes use more.

How accurate is this?

The Mifflin-St Jeor equation used here is the one most dietetic associations currently recommend, and it typically lands within about 10% of measured resting metabolic rate. That still leaves meaningful individual variation from genetics, body composition, medication and thyroid function. Treat the number as a starting point: track your weight over two to three weeks and adjust by 100-200 calories if the trend is not what you want.