How much energy your body uses in a day

Answer six short questions and you'll get a calorie number you can actually explain to someone, including where every part of it came from.

1

Your body

These four numbers are used to estimate what your body burns just keeping you alive: breathing, pumping blood, staying warm.

years
cm
ft in
lb
Body type the formula should assume (pick whichever matches your body)
Why does this change the answer?

Muscle burns more energy at rest than fat does. On average, male bodies carry more muscle for the same height and weight, so the formula gives them a higher baseline, usually a difference of 100 to 200 calories a day.

It's a crude average, not a rule about you. If you know your actual body fat percentage, enter it below and this setting stops mattering. The calculation switches to one based on your real muscle mass instead.

Body fat percentage (optional; leave blank if you don't know it)
%
Only fill this in if you've had it properly measured. A guess makes the result worse, not better.
2

A normal day, not counting exercise

This is the question other calculators get wrong. Think about your job, your commute and your evenings. Ignore workouts completely. You'll add those next.

Everyday activity
Not sure which one you are?

Almost everyone picks one level too high. If you're hovering between two, take the lower one. You can always correct it in a couple of weeks using the real-world check at the bottom of this page.

The single best guide is your step count. If your phone tracks it, check last week's daily average and use that.

3

Deliberate exercise

Only sessions you'd actually call a workout. It gets spread evenly across the week, so a rest day and a gym day give the same daily figure.

How hard, typically?
Why is the exercise number smaller than my watch says?

Your watch usually reports total calories burned during the hour. But you'd have burned some of those anyway, just by existing, and those are already counted in the first line of your budget.

So this figure only counts the extra on top. Counting it twice is the most common reason people's numbers come out too high.

4

What you want to happen

Eat your total and your weight holds steady. Eat under it and you lose; over it and you gain. Everything else is detail.

Goal

How fast is sensible?

A loss of about 0.5–1% of your body weight per week is the range most people can hold without losing muscle, feeling wretched, or quitting. For someone at 80 kg / 175 lb that's roughly 0.4–0.8 kg or 1–1.75 lb a week.

Faster isn't better. Bigger cuts mean more hunger, worse sleep and more of the lost weight coming from muscle, and the weeks you give up and eat everything back tend to cancel out the rush anyway.

Gaining is slower than people expect. Above roughly 0.25 kg / 0.5 lb a week, most of the extra arrives as fat rather than muscle.

What actually moves the number

People routinely overrate workouts and underrate everything else. These are worked out for your body at the weight you entered, so they're your figures, not a generic table.

Calculated with the same MET method as the main estimate, counting only the energy above what you'd have burned sitting still, except the standing figure, which uses a measured value from a meta-analysis of 46 studies rather than the MET table, because the table overstates it roughly fourfold. Real numbers vary with terrain, pace, fitness and how much you fidget. Sources.

Treat this as a starting point, not a verdict

Every calculator on the internet, including this one, is running a formula built from population averages. For most people it lands within about 10% of the truth, which at 2,400 calories is a swing of 240 either way. Two people with identical stats can genuinely differ by more than that.

So the number above isn't a fact about your body. It's a sensible opening bid. Your own weight over the next few weeks is the only measurement that actually knows the answer.

How to correct it with real data

  1. Eat the target for two full weeks. One week isn't enough. Water weight swings with salt, carbs, sleep and hormones, and can easily mask a real change.
  2. Weigh yourself the same way each time. Morning, after the toilet, before eating. Write down every day, then compare this week's average to last week's. Never compare single days.
  3. Compare the change to your plan. Moving in the right direction at roughly the rate you chose? The number was right. Leave it alone.
  4. If nothing moved, adjust by 150–200 calories in the direction you want, then run another two weeks. Small corrections converge fast; big ones just make you miserable and hide what's working.
  5. Redo this calculation after every 5–6 kg or 10–12 lb. A smaller body needs less energy, so a target that worked at the start will quietly stop working.

Once you have that fortnight of data, the recalibration tool does step four for you. It works backwards from what you ate and what the scale did, to your measured daily total. No formula involved.

If this page is making you anxious

Tracking calories helps some people and harms others. If you find yourself checking this number repeatedly, driving it lower, or feeling worse after using it, that's worth taking seriously, and it's more important than getting the arithmetic right.

In the US, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders runs a helpline staffed by licensed clinicians on 1-866-662-1235, and lists free support groups and referrals at allianceforeatingdisorders.com. Elsewhere, your GP or family doctor is a good first call.

Common questions

The things people ask before they trust a number like this.

How many calories should I eat a day?

There is no single answer: it depends on your size, age, how you spend your day and what you want your weight to do. The calculator above works it out in four parts you can check, rather than handing you one number from nowhere. For most adults the answer lands somewhere between 1,600 and 3,000.

Why do calorie calculators give me different answers?

Mostly because they use different activity multipliers, and those multipliers are broad. A calculator that treats “moderately active” as 1.55 and one that treats it as 1.45 will differ by a couple of hundred calories on identical inputs. Underneath, most of them use the same resting-metabolism equation.

Is my calculator double-counting my exercise?

Very likely, if it asked you only one question about activity. Those dropdowns usually describe activity levels in terms of workouts per week, so your training is already inside the multiplier, and then people log the same session again from a watch. This calculator asks about your day and your training separately for exactly that reason.

How accurate are TDEE calculators?

Roughly ±10% for most people, which is a swing of about 240 calories at 2,400. That is why the estimate here is shown as a range, and why the honest use of any calculator is as a starting point you correct with a few weeks of real weigh-ins.

What is a safe calorie deficit?

Around 0.5 to 1% of your body weight lost per week suits most people. Going harder tends to mean more hunger, worse sleep and more muscle lost alongside the fat. This calculator will not cut more than 25% below your total, and will not show a target under 1,200 calories for women or 1,500 for men.

How do I find my actual TDEE instead of an estimate?

Track what you eat for two weeks, take a weekly average of your weigh-ins at each end, and work the sum backwards: what you ate plus what your body pulled from its own stores equals what you burn. The recalibration page does this arithmetic for you and flags the results that look implausible.

Your target
— See the breakdown