Calculate your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE)

01The exact formula behind the result

The calculator asks for five inputs: age, sex, height (in feet and inches, or in centimetres), weight in kilograms and an activity level. From the first four it calculates basal metabolic rate (BMR) using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, with weight in kilograms and height in centimetres: for men, 10 × weight + 6.25 × height − 5 × age + 5; for women, 10 × weight + 6.25 × height − 5 × age − 161. BMR is what your body would burn lying still for twenty-four hours, keeping the heart, brain, liver and lungs at work.

Your TDEE is that BMR multiplied by an activity factor: 1.2 if you are sedentary, 1.375 if lightly active, 1.55 if moderately active, 1.725 if very active and 1.9 if you train like an athlete. The factor stands in for everything beyond lying still: standing, walking, working, cooking, training. Each of the five activity cards carries the figure it leads to, so you see all five totals at once, and what moving up or down a level would change. If you want the resting figure alone, the BMR calculator stops at step one; this page carries the calculation through to a full day.

For an Indian yardstick, the calculator prints the 2020 reference figure of the Indian Council of Medical Research's National Institute of Nutrition (ICMR-NIN) for your sex: 2,110 kcal a day for a sedentary 65 kg man or 1,660 kcal for a sedentary 55 kg woman, rising to 2,710 and 2,130 kcal with moderate work.

02Choosing your activity level honestly

Sedentary (1.2) describes most urban working days in India: desk work, a car, bus or metro commute, evenings at home. The commute may be long and genuinely exhausting, but sitting in traffic burns very little. Lightly active (1.375) means that same day plus exercise on one to three days a week, or work that keeps you on your feet for part of it: teaching, shop work, running a household without help.

Moderately active (1.55) is exercise on three to five days a week, or work that keeps you on your feet most of the day, such as field sales on foot or hospital shifts. Very active (1.725) is hard exercise on six or seven days a week, or farm or construction work. Athlete (1.9) is reserved for people who train twice a day or do heavy manual labour all day. It is the rarest band, not a compliment.

Most people place themselves one band too high. A tiring day is not an active day: meetings, screens and traffic drain you without burning much. If you are torn between two bands, choose the lower one. A modest underestimate is easily corrected, while an inflated one quietly erases the deficit you think you are eating at.

03Maintenance is a starting line, not a target

TDEE is the intake at which your weight broadly holds steady. To lose weight you eat consistently below it; to gain, consistently above it, ideally alongside strength training. The word that matters is consistently: a single careful day changes nothing, and a single festival meal ruins nothing. To convert your TDEE into a daily calorie target for a specific goal, use the calorie calculator; to split that target into protein, carbohydrate and fat, use the macro calculator.

04What this estimate cannot tell you

The Mifflin-St Jeor equation was built on population averages, and you are not an average. Two people of identical age, height and weight can burn meaningfully different amounts if one carries more muscle. The equation cannot see body composition. The activity factor is self-reported and coarse. Thyroid conditions, polycystic ovary syndrome, some medications and pregnancy all shift energy needs in ways no calculator captures.

Treat the result as a well-informed first draft. Eat near it for a few weeks, watch your weight and energy, and adjust. The trend on the scale is better evidence than any formula.

05What a trained practitioner does next

A number is the easy part. A trained nutrition counsellor turns a TDEE estimate into actual meals (dal, roti, rice, curd, seasonal vegetables) that fit a client's budget, culture and appetite, then monitors and adjusts as the body responds. That translation from arithmetic to plate is a learned skill. NNWA's Diploma in Nutrition covers energy balance and meal planning from first principles, and the weight-management programme works through the deficit side of this page in practical depth. Both award skill-enhancement certificates: a foundation for practice, not a clinical licence.