TDEE Calculator

Your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) is the total calories your body burns in a day. It is the foundation number for any fitness or nutrition plan — cut from it to lose weight, eat at it to maintain, add to it to gain muscle.

How TDEE is calculated

1. BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) — calories burned at rest, just keeping organs running. Computed via the Mifflin-St Jeor equation (1990), the most accurate widely-used BMR formula for the general adult population.
2. TDEE = BMR × an activity multiplier between 1.2 (sedentary desk job) and 1.9 (extremely active athlete or manual labour worker).
3. Goal calories = TDEE ± a deficit or surplus. Subtract 500 kcal/day to lose ~0.5 kg/week; add 250 kcal/day for slow, lean muscle gain.

Mifflin-St Jeor formula

Men: BMR = (10 × weight kg) + (6.25 × height cm) − (5 × age) + 5

Women: BMR = (10 × weight kg) + (6.25 × height cm) − (5 × age) − 161

Macro split

Once you have your goal calories, split them between protein, carbs, and fat. Calorie density: protein and carbs are 4 kcal/g; fat is 9 kcal/g. The five presets cover most use cases — Balanced (30/40/30) for maintenance, High-protein (40/30/30) for cutting or lean bulks, Low-carb (30/20/50) for keto-adjacent eating, and two Indian-staple presets (vegetarian 20/55/25 and non-vegetarian 25/50/25) that mirror what dal-rice-roti diets actually look like.

Worked example

Take a 30-year-old man, 70 kg and 175 cm, who is moderately active. His BMR is (10 × 70) + (6.25 × 175) − (5 × 30) + 5 = 700 + 1,093.75 − 150 + 5 ≈ 1,649 kcal. Multiply by the moderate activity factor of 1.55 and his TDEE is about 2,556 kcal/day — the amount that keeps his weight stable. To lose roughly half a kilo a week he would eat around 2,056 kcal (a 500-kcal deficit); for slow, lean muscle gain he would eat around 2,806 kcal (a 250-kcal surplus). On the Indian-vegetarian 20/55/25 preset at maintenance, that splits into roughly 128 g protein, 351 g carbs, and 71 g fat per day. Change any input — sex, age, weight, activity, or goal — and every downstream number updates instantly.

Choosing an activity level (and the Asia-Pacific note)

The single biggest source of error is over-stating activity. A desk job with a couple of light gym sessions a week is usually "lightly active" (×1.375), not "moderate". Reserve the higher multipliers for people who genuinely train hard most days or do physical labour. For Indian and other South-Asian users there is a second reason to be conservative: at the same BMI, South Asians tend to carry more body fat and less muscle than the Western populations these equations were largely built on, which can nudge true resting metabolism slightly lower. Start one notch below the level you are tempted to pick, then let your real weight trend correct you.

Tips for using your number

• Treat the calorie target as a starting hypothesis, not a law — track weight for 2–3 weeks and adjust by 100–200 kcal based on the trend.
• Weigh yourself under consistent conditions (morning, post-bathroom, pre-food) so the trend is meaningful.
• Do not let dietary fat fall below about 20% of calories — it underpins hormone health.
• Re-run the calculator after every ~5 kg of weight change; your BMR moves with your bodyweight.

Common mistakes

• Eating at BMR. BMR is rest-only metabolism; dieting down to it is far too aggressive and rarely sustainable.
• Picking too high an activity factor. The most common reason a "deficit" stalls.
• Expecting precision. Mifflin-St Jeor is accurate as formulas go, but individual variance runs ±10–15%.
• Forcing 40% protein on a pure-veg diet. Without paneer, dairy, soya, or a supplement, 20–25% is the realistic ceiling — which is why the Indian-veg preset uses 20%.

Screening tool, not medical advice. These estimates are for healthy adults pursuing general fitness goals. If you have a thyroid disorder, diabetes, kidney disease, an eating disorder, or are pregnant or breastfeeding, the numbers here can be misleading — consult a registered dietitian or your doctor before acting on them.