Free TDEE calculator

What is TDEE (total daily energy expenditure)?

TDEE stands for total daily energy expenditure: the number of calories you burn in a whole day. In plain terms, TDEE means what your body uses at rest, plus everything you do, plus digesting your food. Eat about your TDEE and your weight stays steady; eat less and you lose weight. For a 40-year-old woman of 70 kg (154 lb) and 165 cm (5′5″) who walks 8,000 steps a day, it’s about 1,890 calories; for a man of 85 kg (187 lb) and 178 cm (5′10″), about 2,440. Work out yours with the maintenance calorie calculator, or see the average calories burned per day by age.

Deficitly builds your TDEE from five parts, the same ones you see in the bar above: your resting burn (BMR), daily life (10% of BMR), your steps, your workouts, and digestion (about 10% of what you eat).

Why steps instead of an activity level?

Most TDEE calculators ask you to pick “sedentary”, “lightly active” or “very active” and multiply your BMR by 1.2 to 1.9 (the classic TDEE formula). Those labels mean different things to different people, and one step between them is often worth 250–300 calories a day (see what each level means in steps). Your phone already counts your steps, and that count is fairly reliable. Deficitly turns your average steps into calories from your height and weight (see what 10,000 steps burn), and adds each workout by type, minutes and times per week, without counting the steps from your workouts twice.

How to use your TDEE to lose weight

Eat less than your TDEE. A deficit of about 0.5% of your body weight a week is a pace most people can keep: at 80 kg (176 lb) that’s 0.4 kg (0.9 lb) a week, or about 440 calories a day below your TDEE. The Goal card plans it three ways: pick a pace, pick a date, or enter what you eat now to see where it takes you. It never suggests less than 1,200 calories a day for women or 1,500 for men, and it splits the result into protein, carbs and fat (see the macro calculator). Compare paces side by side in the calorie deficit calculator. More on how many calories to eat to lose weight and how much protein you need.

How accurate is it?

Every formula is an estimate. Equations like Mifflin-St Jeor miss individuals by about 10% either way, which is why your result comes with a range. Use it as your starting point: eat about that amount for 3–4 weeks and watch your weight trend. If the trend is flat, that’s your real TDEE; if it moves, adjust by 100–200 calories. Fitness watches tend to overestimate the calories you burn, so Deficitly uses your step count rather than your watch’s calorie number. The formulas and sources are on how Deficitly calculates, and how to check your number on how accurate TDEE calculators are.

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