There is no “good” TDEE. It is a description of your body's energy needs, not a score. A larger, taller, younger, or more active person will have a higher TDEE than a smaller, older, or more sedentary one, and neither number is better than the other. What matters is whether you are eating above, at, or below your own number relative to your goal.

How many calories do I burn a day without exercise?

That is closer to your BMR plus non-exercise movement, which for most adults means roughly your BMR multiplied by 1.2. If the person in the worked example above were sedentary instead of moderately active, a 1,758-calorie BMR would correspond to about 2,109 calories per day. Even a fully desk-bound day burns meaningfully more than your resting rate.

Is TDEE the same as maintenance calories?

Yes, practically speaking. Your TDEE is the estimated number of calories that keeps your weight stable, which is what “maintenance calories” means. If your weight is genuinely holding steady over two to three weeks, your actual intake during that period is a better estimate of your maintenance than any equation.

Why does my TDEE go down when I lose weight?

A smaller body costs less energy to move and maintain, so both your BMR and the calorie cost of your activity fall as your weight falls. This is why a deficit that worked at the start of a weight change stops producing the same result months later. Recalculating every 10 to 15 pounds of change keeps the estimate current.

Should I eat below 1,200 or 1,500 calories a day to lose faster?

This tool will not display a target below 1,200 calories per day for women or 1,500 for men, because eating at that level without medical supervision raises real risks around nutrient adequacy, muscle loss, and gallbladder issues. If your calculated deficit lands there, that is a signal to talk with a physician rather than to eat less. Faster is not the same as better.

Does this calculator store or send my information?

No. Every calculation runs entirely in your browser, and nothing you type is transmitted to Protocol MD, saved to an account, or exchanged for your email address. You can close the tab and the numbers are gone.

Free Calculator

TDEE Calculator: Estimate Your Total Daily Energy Expenditure

Your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) is the estimated number of calories your body uses in 24 hours: your resting metabolism, plus the energy you burn moving, plus the energy spent digesting food. This calculator estimates it by running the Mifflin-St Jeor equation on your sex, age, height, and weight to get your resting burn, then multiplying by an activity factor from 1.2 (sedentary) to 1.9 (very heavy training). Most adults land somewhere between roughly 1,600 and 3,200 calories per day. The number is an estimate from a published equation, not a measurement of your metabolism.

Your estimate appears here as soon as every field is filled in. Nothing is submitted and nothing is sent.

Not for use during pregnancy or breastfeeding, under 18, or while being treated for an eating disorder. Talk to your physician first.

Educational only. This tool does not diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any condition, and it is not medical advice or a recommendation of any specific therapy.

These numbers are estimates produced by a published equation. Individual needs vary. Talk with a licensed physician before making changes to how you eat, train, or take medication.

Using this calculator does not create a physician-patient relationship with Protocol MD.

Not for use during pregnancy or breastfeeding, under 18, or while being treated for an eating disorder. Talk to your physician first.

If tracking calories or weight feels compulsive or distressing, that is worth raising with a clinician. In the US you can text "NEDA" to 741741 to reach a trained volunteer at Crisis Text Line, any time.

Your inputs stay in your browser. Nothing you type here is sent to us, saved to an account, stored, or emailed. Like any page on this site, we do record that the page was visited.

What Is TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure)?

TDEE is the full 24-hour energy cost of being alive and active: keeping your organs running, moving through your day, training, and breaking down what you eat. This calculator estimates that total rather than measuring it. A real measurement means indirect calorimetry in a clinical or laboratory setting, or doubly labeled water over a period of weeks. An equation plus a five-step activity factor gets you a reasonable starting point instead, which is what most people actually need.

The Components of Daily Energy Burn

Daily burn breaks into three parts. Basal metabolic rate is roughly 60 to 70% of the total. The thermic effect of food is roughly 10%. Physical activity is roughly 15 to 30%, and that share swings more between two people than either of the others.

Component	Rough share	What it covers
Basal metabolic rate (BMR)	60 to 70%	Breathing, circulation, cell repair, brain function: everything that runs while you lie still.
Thermic effect of food	About 10%	The energy spent digesting, absorbing, and storing what you eat.
Physical activity	15 to 30%	Deliberate exercise plus NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis): fidgeting, walking, standing, posture, chores.

NEAT sits inside the physical-activity share. It is not a fourth component standing alongside the other three, and counting it twice is the most common way these percentages get misquoted. It is also the most variable piece: two people with identical training schedules can differ by hundreds of calories a day purely in how much they move the rest of the time.

TDEE vs. BMR: The Difference

BMR is what you would burn lying still in a quiet room, doing nothing at all. TDEE is that number plus everything you actually do with your day. The gap between the two is exactly what the activity multiplier is standing in for. If you want the resting number on its own, use the BMR calculator (your resting burn).

How This TDEE Calculator Works

Two steps, both of them auditable. First the Mifflin-St Jeor equation estimates your resting burn from sex, age, height, and weight. Then that resting figure is multiplied by an activity factor. Nothing else is happening, and no part of the calculation leaves your browser.

The Mifflin-St Jeor Equation

Written out in full, for both published constants:

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

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

pounds × 0.45359237 = kilograms

inches × 2.54 = centimeters

TDEE = BMR × activity multiplier

The equation was published in 1990 and validated against indirect calorimetry in healthy adults: Mifflin MD, St Jeor ST, et al., A new predictive equation for resting energy expenditure in healthy individuals, Am J Clin Nutr 1990. The sex constant is a coefficient the authors derived from their data, which is why this tool asks for it.

The Five Activity Multipliers

Level	Multiplier	What a week usually looks like
Sedentary	×1.2	A desk job and little or no deliberate exercise.
Light	×1.375	Light exercise 1 to 3 days per week.
Moderate	×1.55	Moderate exercise 3 to 5 days per week.
Heavy	×1.725	Hard exercise 6 to 7 days per week.
Very Heavy	×1.9	A physically demanding job, or training twice a day.

Self-reported activity is the single largest source of error in the output, and the error runs in one direction: most people pick a level above the one they live in. A desk job plus three gym sessions a week is usually Light to Moderate, not Heavy. Choose from the last four weeks of actual behavior rather than from what you intend to do. For a reference point on what a typical adult week is supposed to contain, see the CDC Physical Activity Guidelines for Adults.

How Accurate Is a TDEE Estimate?

Mifflin-St Jeor estimates resting energy expenditure within about 10% of a measured value in most adults, so a 1,758-calorie BMR estimate could reasonably be 1,580 to 1,930. The TDEE figure carries more uncertainty than that, because the activity multiplier is a coarse five-step guess layered on top. Treat the total as a starting point, not a measurement.

The roughly 10% figure comes from a systematic review of predictive equations: Frankenfield D, Roth-Yousey L, Compher C, Comparison of predictive equations for resting metabolic rate in healthy nonobese and obese adults, J Am Diet Assoc 2005. It describes the resting number, not the total.

One thing the equation never sees is body composition. Two people at the same sex, age, height, and weight can carry very different amounts of lean mass, and lean mass is metabolically expensive. That is a large part of why the same inputs produce the same estimate for two people whose real needs differ.

Using Your TDEE: Deficit, Maintenance, and Surplus

Eating at your TDEE is maintenance. Eating under it is a deficit, eating over it is a surplus. The conventional arithmetic uses about 3,500 calories per pound of body fat, so a 500-calorie daily deficit reads as roughly a pound a week on paper.

That arithmetic overestimates loss over long horizons, and it does so predictably. As body weight falls, both resting burn and the calorie cost of moving that body fall with it, so the same intake produces a smaller and smaller gap. Measured weight curves flatten over months rather than tracking a straight line: Hall KD, Sacks G, Chandramohan D, et al., Quantification of the effect of energy imbalance on bodyweight, Lancet 2011. If you want a model that accounts for that adaptation instead of assuming it away, the NIH Body Weight Planner is the standard public tool.

To turn a TDEE into a maintenance figure and a daily target with a rough timeline, use the calorie calculator (maintenance and a daily target).

A Note on Very Low Calorie Targets

This tool will not print an intake number below 1,200 calories per day for women or 1,500 for men. That is not a comment on anyone's discipline. Below those intakes it becomes genuinely difficult to meet protein, vitamin, and mineral needs from food, which is a nutrition problem rather than a willpower one. Lower-calorie approaches do exist in clinical practice, and they run under physician supervision with monitoring. If your numbers land near the floor, a longer timeline is a normal and acceptable answer.

What Changes Your TDEE

Several things move the number, some of them quickly and some of them over years.

Muscle mass. Lean tissue costs more to maintain than fat tissue, so building or losing it shifts resting burn.
Age. Tissue composition and typical activity both change over decades, and the equation subtracts a fixed amount per year to approximate that.
Sleep. Short or disrupted sleep tends to reduce spontaneous movement the next day, which lowers the activity share.
NEAT. How much you move outside of training drifts up and down without anyone noticing, and it is the piece most likely to fall quietly during a long deficit.
Illness and recovery. Acute illness, injury, and healing all change energy demand, in either direction.
Thyroid function. Thyroid hormone is one of the main regulators of resting metabolic rate, and disorders of it can move the number meaningfully.
Pregnancy. Energy needs during pregnancy and breastfeeding are different and are not modeled by this equation at all.
Certain medications. Some medications influence appetite, energy expenditure, or both. A physician is the right person to say what applies to you.

Worth separating two things that get conflated: appetite and energy expenditure are not the same. Something can change how hungry you feel without changing how many calories you burn, and the reverse is also true.

How Protocol MD Approaches This

Protocol MD is a physician-guided peptide practice. Our clinicians work across performance, longevity, and body composition, alongside recovery, sleep, energy, and cellular health. Compounded GLP-1 medications are one of several things a physician may consider after reviewing your medical history. Compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide are prepared by a licensed compounding pharmacy. They are not FDA-approved, and FDA does not review compounded drugs for safety, effectiveness, or quality. They are available only when a licensed physician determines the treatment is appropriate for you. Nothing is prescribed based on a calculator, and eligibility is determined only by a licensed physician after a full medical review.

For background on the practice itself, here is what peptide therapy is and how it is used.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good TDEE?: There is no “good” TDEE. It is a description of your body's energy needs, not a score. A larger, taller, younger, or more active person will have a higher TDEE than a smaller, older, or more sedentary one, and neither number is better than the other. What matters is whether you are eating above, at, or below your own number relative to your goal.
How many calories do I burn a day without exercise?: That is closer to your BMR plus non-exercise movement, which for most adults means roughly your BMR multiplied by 1.2. If the person in the worked example above were sedentary instead of moderately active, a 1,758-calorie BMR would correspond to about 2,109 calories per day. Even a fully desk-bound day burns meaningfully more than your resting rate.
Is TDEE the same as maintenance calories?: Yes, practically speaking. Your TDEE is the estimated number of calories that keeps your weight stable, which is what “maintenance calories” means. If your weight is genuinely holding steady over two to three weeks, your actual intake during that period is a better estimate of your maintenance than any equation.
How accurate is the Mifflin-St Jeor equation?: It is the most widely used predictive equation in clinical nutrition and typically estimates resting energy expenditure within about 10% for most adults. That margin applies to the resting number; the total daily figure carries more uncertainty, because the activity multiplier is a coarse five-step guess layered on top. It also performs less well at the extremes of body size and in people with unusually high or low muscle mass, because it never sees your body composition. Treat the output as a starting point you adjust with real-world weight data, not a fixed truth.
Why does my TDEE go down when I lose weight?: A smaller body costs less energy to move and maintain, so both your BMR and the calorie cost of your activity fall as your weight falls. This is why a deficit that worked at the start of a weight change stops producing the same result months later. Recalculating every 10 to 15 pounds of change keeps the estimate current.
Should I eat below 1,200 or 1,500 calories a day to lose faster?: This tool will not display a target below 1,200 calories per day for women or 1,500 for men, because eating at that level without medical supervision raises real risks around nutrient adequacy, muscle loss, and gallbladder issues. If your calculated deficit lands there, that is a signal to talk with a physician rather than to eat less. Faster is not the same as better.
Does this calculator store or send my information?: No. Every calculation runs entirely in your browser, and nothing you type is transmitted to Protocol MD, saved to an account, or exchanged for your email address. You can close the tab and the numbers are gone.

BMI calculator, with its limitations spelled out
Scales your weight to your height and shows the standard adult categories, along with a clear account of what the number cannot tell you.
BMR calculator (your resting burn)
Estimates the calories your body burns at complete rest using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, plus estimated daily burn at five activity levels.
calorie calculator (maintenance and a daily target)
Estimates your maintenance calories and a daily target based on the gap between your current weight and your goal weight, with a rough timeline.