Calorie Calculator

Find out how many calories you burn in a day and how many to eat to reach your goal. Enter your details below to get your BMR, your maintenance calories (TDEE), and daily targets to lose, maintain, or gain weight — using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation dietitians rely on.

Estimate using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation. Accurate to ~10% for most people. General information, not medical advice.

BMR vs. TDEE — what the two numbers mean

Your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is the energy your body burns just staying alive: breathing, pumping blood, repairing cells. Even if you stayed in bed all day, you would burn roughly this many calories. Your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) is your BMR plus everything else — walking, working, training, even fidgeting. TDEE is the number that actually governs your weight: eat at it and your weight holds steady, eat below it and you lose, above it and you gain.

How to use your calorie target

Pick the goal row that matches what you want, then eat around that number for two to three weeks and watch the scale trend, not the daily noise. If you are losing faster than planned, add a little food; if nothing is moving after three weeks, trim slightly. A deficit of about 500 calories a day produces roughly a pound of fat loss per week, which is fast enough to see progress and slow enough to protect muscle and energy. For the best body-composition results, pair your calorie target with enough protein — our protein calculator shows exactly how much you need.

Nutrition questions