Free TDEE Calculator
Calculate your Total Daily Energy Expenditure — how many calories your body burns per day, including BMR, activity, and the thermic effect of food. Free, no sign-up needed.
Your Results
Macro Breakdown
Recommended daily macros based on your TDEE and activity level
Calorie Targets for Weight Goals
| Goal | Calories/day | Weekly Change |
|---|
Your TDEE From What You Record — Every Day
This calculator gives you a starting point. The app recalculates your TDEE every day from what your Apple Watch or phone records and what you log — and with Dynamic Deficit on, it adjusts your daily deficit to the weight and days left to your goal.
What is TDEE?
TDEE stands for Total Daily Energy Expenditure — the total number of calories your body burns in a single day. It’s the sum of three components:
- BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate): The calories your body needs at complete rest to maintain basic functions — breathing, circulation, cell production. For a sedentary or lightly active person it is about 60–70% of the day’s burn (FAO/WHO/UNU 2004).
- Physical Activity: All movement, from walking to the gym to fidgeting — the part that changes most from day to day.
- TEF (Thermic Effect of Food): The energy cost of digesting, absorbing, and metabolizing your food — about 10% of the energy on a mixed diet (5–15%, Westerterp 2004).
Knowing your TDEE is the foundation of any nutrition goal. To lose weight, eat below your TDEE. To gain weight or build muscle, eat above it. To maintain, match it.
How We Calculate BMR
By default we use the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, which estimates BMR from weight, height, age, and sex. If you enter your body fat percentage, we switch to the Katch-McArdle formula, which uses lean body mass — the same choice the AI Food Coach app makes.
Mifflin-St Jeor (default):
Female: BMR = (10 × weightkg) + (6.25 × heightcm) − (5 × age) − 161
Katch-McArdle (when body fat % is known):
BMR = 370 + (21.6 × LBM)
Mifflin and St Jeor derived their equation in 1990 from 498 healthy adults whose resting energy was measured by indirect calorimetry; in the same people, the older Harris-Benedict equations overestimated it by 5% (Mifflin 1990). Katch-McArdle (BMR = 370 + 21.6 × lean mass) is the equation Cunningham proposed in 1991. For a detailed breakdown of how these formulas work in practice, see our step-by-step guide to TDEE calculation.
Activity Level Guide
The activity multiplier turns your BMR into a whole day’s burn. These are the levels the AI Food Coach app uses:
| Level | Multiplier | Who This Is For |
|---|---|---|
| Sedentary | 1.2 | Desk job, little exercise |
| Light | 1.375 | 1–2 workouts a week |
| Moderate | 1.55 | 3–5 workouts a week |
| Active | 1.725 | 6–7 workouts a week |
| Very Active | 1.9 | Athlete, physical job |
Tip: If you’re unsure between two levels, take the lower one and compare your weight with the plan after 2–3 weeks. With Apple Health on, the app takes your level from the workouts Apple Health recorded in the last 14 days instead.
Why Body Fat Percentage Matters
Two people can weigh the same and still burn different amounts at rest. A 90 kg person with 15% body fat has 76.5 kg of lean mass, a 90 kg person with 35% body fat 58.5 kg — Katch-McArdle gives them 2,022 and 1,634 kcal.
Mifflin-St Jeor uses total weight, so it gives both the same BMR at the same height, age, and sex. Katch-McArdle calculates BMR from lean body mass (total weight minus fat), because resting energy depends mostly on lean mass (Cunningham 1991) — which makes it more accurate for people with higher or lower than average body fat.
If you know your body fat percentage (from a DEXA scan, calipers, or a reliable estimate), enter it above for a more precise result.
What is TEF (Thermic Effect of Food)?
The Thermic Effect of Food is the energy your body spends digesting and processing nutrients. Different macronutrients have different thermic effects:
- Protein: 20–30% of its calories are burned during digestion
- Carbohydrates: 5–10% of calories
- Fat: 0–3% of calories
So a high-protein diet burns more in digestion at the same intake. The ranges are from Westerterp 2004; this calculator, like the app, uses 25% for protein, 7.5% for carbohydrates, and 2.5% for fat (Hall 2010) on the macros above and adds the result to your TDEE.
For a deeper dive into TEF and how it affects your calorie targets, read our detailed guide on TDEE calculation.
Want to see how different macro ratios change your TEF? Try our TEF Calculator for a per-macronutrient breakdown.
Using TDEE for Weight Loss
Weight loss comes down to consistently eating fewer calories than your TDEE. The size of your deficit sets the speed — by the commonly used estimate of 7,700 kcal per kilogram of body fat:
- Mild deficit (275 kcal/day): ~0.25 kg/week.
- Moderate deficit (550 kcal/day): ~0.5 kg/week.
- Aggressive deficit (825 kcal/day): ~0.75 kg/week.
People who lose about 0.5–1 kg (1–2 lb) a week are more likely to keep the weight off (CDC). For weight loss, clinical guidelines prescribe 1,200–1,500 kcal a day for women and 1,500–1,800 kcal for men, and keep diets under 800 kcal for medical settings (AHA/ACC/TOS 2013). The calculator, like the app, never shows a target below 1,200 kcal for women or 1,500 kcal for men.
The app’s limit: at most 1 kg (about 2 lb) of weight loss a week — a deficit of 1,100 kcal a day.
Beyond a Static Calculator
A TDEE calculator gives you a useful starting estimate, but your real TDEE changes every day. A rest day burns fewer calories than a workout day, and a high-protein meal costs more to digest than a high-fat meal.
That’s why AI Food Coach recalculates your TDEE every day from what you record:
- Apple Watch / Health Connect: The resting and active energy your watch records replace the formula and the multiplier. They are the watch’s estimates — in a study of seven wrist devices none estimated energy expenditure within 20%, and Apple Watch came closest (Shcherbina 2017).
- AI food logging: Snap a photo of your food on a kitchen scale — AI reads the weight and estimates the macros in seconds.
- Automatic TEF: Calculated from the macros you actually logged.
- Weight trend: Your 7-day average weight shows whether the plan works — and with Dynamic Deficit on, the daily deficit follows it.
The result is a TDEE that follows your day as you move and exercise — with TEF added as you eat.
For the full scientific methodology behind our calculations, see our methodology and sources page.
