TDEE Calculator Total Daily Energy Expenditure & Calorie Target
Calculate your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) using the Mifflin-St Jeor formula. Get your BMR, activity adjusted maintenance calories, goal based calorie target, and macro split instantly.
Not medical advice. This calculator gives a general estimate based on the values you enter. It cannot account for your medical history, medication or body composition. Talk to a doctor or a registered dietitian before acting on any result.
How this TDEE calculator turns basal metabolism into a daily calorie number you can actually use
Total Daily Energy Expenditure is everything your body burns in a day, resting metabolism, digestion, and every bit of movement layered on top. This tool builds it in two stages: first it estimates your Basal Metabolic Rate with the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, then it scales that number up by an activity multiplier to reach TDEE, and finally applies a goal based adjustment to land on a calorie target for weight loss, maintenance, or gain.
The whole pipeline runs as plain arithmetic in your browser. Age, weight, and height never leave the page, there’s no server call involved at any step.
Stage one: BMR via Mifflin-St Jeor
The tool uses the 1990 Mifflin-St Jeor equation, derived by fitting measured resting metabolic rate data from 498 healthy adults to weight, height, age, and sex. It’s the formula the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics recommends over the older Harris-Benedict equation for general use, since it tracks more closely with directly measured metabolic rates in contemporary populations.
Goal deltas and the pound-per-week logic behind them
| Goal | Daily Adjustment | Approx. Weekly Change |
|---|---|---|
| Lose 2 lbs/week | -1000 kcal | -2 lb |
| Lose 1 lb/week | -500 kcal | -1 lb |
| Lose 0.5 lb/week | -250 kcal | -0.5 lb |
| Maintain weight | 0 kcal | 0 |
| Gain 0.5 lb/week | +250 kcal | +0.5 lb |
| Gain 1 lb/week | +500 kcal | +1 lb |
The math behind these deltas rests on the long standing estimate that a pound of body fat stores roughly 3500 kcal, so a 500 kcal daily deficit or surplus works out to about one pound a week. It’s an approximation, actual weight change involves water shifts, glycogen, and metabolic adaptation that this simple linear model doesn’t capture, but it remains a reasonable planning starting point.
Macro split and BMI, bundled in
Goal-linked macro ratios
Losing weight shifts the split toward 40 percent protein and 30 percent carbs to help preserve lean mass in a deficit. Gaining shifts toward 30 percent protein and 50 percent carbs to fuel training volume. Fat fills whatever percentage remains, converted at 4 kcal per gram for protein and carbs, 9 kcal per gram for fat.
BMI cross-reference
The same height and weight inputs feed a standard BMI calculation alongside the calorie numbers, giving you a second, independent reference point using the WHO’s weight-over-height-squared classification without needing to run a separate tool.
- Mifflin, St Jeor et al., American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1990, the source study for the BMR formula used here.
- Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics guidance recommending Mifflin-St Jeor as the preferred equation.
- CDC, Losing Weight guidance, including the calorie-deficit-to-weight-change relationship.
This tool provides an educational estimate for planning purposes, not a personalized medical or nutrition prescription. It cannot account for metabolic conditions, medications, or individual metabolic adaptation. Consult a doctor or registered dietitian before starting a significant calorie change, particularly at or near the 1200 kcal floor.
Setting a calorie target
Setting an initial calorie target before starting a cut, maintenance phase, or bulk, recalculating a target after a meaningful weight change since BMR shifts with body weight, cross checking a fitness tracker’s calorie burn estimate against an independent formula, and giving a coach or dietitian a documented starting point to adjust from.
Questions About Date Format Converter Online Free
ISO 8601 is the international standard for representing dates and times. Dates are written as YYYY-MM-DD (e.g. 2024-06-15). It is unambiguous and sorts correctly as a string, which is why databases, APIs, and programming languages use it by default.
Paste your date in the input field. If the day is above 12 (e.g. 25/06/2024), the tool detects it as DD/MM and converts it automatically. For dates where the day is 12 or below and ambiguous (e.g. 06/05/2024), the tool defaults to the international DD/MM convention. You see both MM/DD/YYYY (US) and DD/MM/YYYY as separate output rows.
Yes. The output includes both Unix timestamp in seconds (used by most systems) and in milliseconds (used by JavaScript). You can also paste a Unix timestamp as the input and convert it to any readable date format.
The tool accepts: ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD), compact ISO (YYYYMMDD), DD/MM/YYYY with slash, dash or dot, MM/DD/YYYY, YYYY/MM/DD, long formats (June 15 2024, 15 June 2024, Jun 15 2024), Unix timestamps in seconds or milliseconds, and most RFC date strings.
This tool converts one date at a time — paste a value, copy the format you need. For bulk conversion across hundreds of rows, use a spreadsheet formula or a scripting approach. For single lookups, form-filling, and confirming the right format to use, this tool is the fastest option.
From the blog
The research behind the numbers
Where these formulas came from and what the studies actually showed.
