Total Daily Energy Expenditure — the actual calories your body burns every day. Not a guess. Calculated using the Mifflin-St Jeor formula, the gold standard used by dietitians worldwide.
NutriShout builds your complete nutrition plan — meals, grocery list, supplement guide, and month-by-month progress tracking. Free to use, no credit card needed.
Build My Free Plan on NutriShout →Most people trying to lose weight or build muscle focus on the wrong number. They count calories from a food label, subtract it from some arbitrary daily limit like 2000 kcal, and wonder why nothing is working. The problem isn't effort — it's the reference point. 2000 calories is a population average, not your number.
TDEE, or Total Daily Energy Expenditure, is the actual number of calories your body burns every single day — at rest, during digestion, and through physical activity combined. It's the only number that matters when you're trying to eat at a deficit or a surplus with any precision.
BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is what your body burns just to stay alive. Heart beating, lungs breathing, cells dividing — this is the floor. A 70kg, 175cm, 25-year-old male has a BMR of roughly 1700 kcal. That's the body's resting cost of existence.
TDEE multiplies that BMR by an activity factor. The same person working a desk job burns about 2040 kcal total per day. If he trains 4 days a week, that jumps to 2635. That gap — nearly 600 calories — is why people who "eat the same amount" get wildly different results.
This calculator uses Mifflin-St Jeor, the formula most consistently validated in research settings. Published in 1990, it outperforms older equations like Harris-Benedict, especially for people with higher body fat percentages.
Activity multipliers range from 1.2 (sedentary) to 1.9 (twice-daily athlete training). Most people underestimate their activity — if you have a physically demanding job, don't select sedentary just because you skip the gym.
A calorie deficit of 300–500 kcal below TDEE per day is the practical sweet spot for fat loss. This creates roughly 0.3–0.5 kg of weekly loss without tanking energy levels or triggering significant muscle breakdown. Going lower than 500 kcal under TDEE regularly is where most people run into trouble — hunger becomes aggressive, adherence falls, and metabolic adaptation accelerates.
For muscle gain, a lean bulk of 200–300 kcal above TDEE keeps fat gain minimal while giving the body a surplus to actually build tissue. Aggressive bulking usually just adds fat, not muscle.
As you lose weight, your TDEE drops — because a lighter body burns fewer calories. This is exactly why fat loss plateaus happen even when you "haven't changed anything." Recalculate every 4–6 weeks and adjust intake accordingly. NutriShout handles this automatically inside the app, recalculating your plan as your weight updates.
Once you know your calorie target, the next step is splitting it into protein, carbs, and fats. Protein gets set first — typically 1.6–2.2g per kg of bodyweight depending on goal and activity — because it's the most important variable for both fat loss and muscle gain. The remaining calories divide between carbs and fats based on diet preference and training demands.
Your TDEE is just the start. NutriShout builds a complete plan — meals, grocery list, macro targets, supplement guide, and week-by-week progress tracking. All free.
Open NutriShout — It's Free →