The complete guide to TDEE
TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) is the number of calories you burn in a day — resting metabolism plus movement, digestion, and exercise. Formulas estimate it, but they can be off by 10–15% per person; the most accurate way to know yours is to back-calculate it from your real weight trend.
What is TDEE?
Your TDEE is everything your body spends energy on in 24 hours. It's made of four parts: your BMR (calories to keep you alive at rest), the thermic effect of food (digestion), exercise activity, and NEAT — the fidgeting, walking, and non-exercise movement that varies enormously between people.
Because NEAT and metabolism differ so much, two people with identical stats can have TDEEs hundreds of calories apart. That's why a single formula is only a starting point.
How to calculate your TDEE
The common method is Mifflin–St Jeor: estimate BMR from your height, weight, age, and sex, then multiply by an activity factor. It's a solid first guess — try it with our free TDEE calculator.
The catch: the activity multiplier is a guess on top of a guess. Over a few weeks, your actual results tell a more honest story.
Formula vs real (adaptive) TDEE
A real, adaptive TDEE works backwards: it watches how your smoothed weight trend responds to how much you actually eat, then solves for the burn that explains it. It re-fits every week and carries a confidence band instead of pretending to be exact. This is the approach Our Macro uses — see how adaptive TDEE works.
Using TDEE to hit a goal
Once you know your TDEE, your target follows: eat below it to lose, at it to maintain, above it to gain. Pair it with a protein-forward macro split — our macro calculator turns a calorie target into grams.
Common mistakes
Trusting the daily scale instead of the trend, never updating the number as your body changes, and setting an aggressive deficit that you can't sustain. A trend-based, adaptive number sidesteps all three.