TDEE Calculator

Maintenance calories are the number you eat to hold your weight. Go above it and you gain, drop below it and you lose. This calculator finds that line for you. Enter your sex, age, weight, height and how active you are, and it returns your resting burn, your full daily burn, and two targets either side for adding muscle or cutting fat.

What the calculator does

Two steps run under the hood. First it finds your BMR, the calories your body spends at rest using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, the most accurate of the common predictive formulas. Then it multiplies that by an activity factor to get your TDEE, your total daily burn including movement and training.

The activity factor is the part people get wrong. Pick the level that matches a normal week, not your best week. Most athletes who train hard 3-5 days a week land on the moderate setting. If you also stand or walk a lot at work, bump it up a notch.

Reading the three numbers

BMR is the floor. It is what you would burn lying in bed all day, and you should rarely eat below it.

TDEE is maintenance, the calorie level that keeps your weight flat. The surplus target sits about 12% above it, a controlled bump for building lean mass without piling on fat. The deficit target sits about 17% below, an aggressive enough cut to see the scale move while leaving room to train. For a slower, leaner cut, eat between maintenance and that deficit number.

Training days and rest days

A flat daily calorie number ignores how different your days are. Eat nearer the surplus figure on hard training days, when you need the fuel and your body partitions it toward muscle. Drop back toward the deficit figure on rest days. Over a week the average still lands where your goal needs it, but the timing puts more food around the work.

Treat the output as a starting estimate, not gospel. Predictive formulas carry a margin of a few hundred calories per person. Weigh yourself across two weeks, track the trend, and adjust the number up or down by 100-200 kcal if the scale is not moving the way you want.

To split these calories into protein, carbs and fat, run the macro calculator. To check the resting figure on its own, use the BMR calculator. And if your goal is fat loss, the calorie deficit calculator sizes the gap for a target rate. For the full plan that turns these numbers into a recomposition strategy, read Macros for Body Recomposition.