TDEE - What Is It, And How Can I Figure It Out?

Hey there, friends! I hope you're having a great week so far - I surely am! :)

Let's talk about TDEE - a concept it wouldn't hurt to become more familiar with!

TDEE is an acronym for Total Daily Energy Expenditure - it refers to the amount of total calories your body burns throughout the course of an entire day.

(Laughing burns calories too!)

Knowing this information about yourself is one of the most crucial parts of determining an appropriate nutritional approach, because actively creating a caloric deficit or surplus (depending on your agenda) is the cornerstone of any goal-oriented diet plan.

If you know how many calories you burn each day, you can make an informed decision about how many calories you want to add for muscle gain, or subtract for fat loss - or perhaps you might just want to hit that number exactly so that you maintain your weight where it is.

If you’re interested in fitness and have heard about TDEE, you may have been curious about how this gets calculated - long story short, it takes into account your BMR (basal metabolic rate), the calories you burn through activity, and the TEF (thermic effect of food).

Your BMR, or basal metabolic rate, is based on height, weight, and age, and represents the calories your body burns at rest. Basically, this tells you how many calories you’d burn if you laid in bed all day - it only takes into account the amount of energy it takes to keep you alive (breathing, heart beating, other essential body processes).

When you are active, whether it’s just moving around during your daily life or exercising with purpose, your body burns additional energy through this exertion. When you calculate your TDEE, you estimate the amount of activity you do on any given day to get the most accurate possible average of how many calories your burn.

Your TDEE will also include the TEF, or thermic effect of food that you eat - meaning the amount of calories that it takes to break down your food into elements that your body can absorb and use.

This may sound complicated, but thankfully there are calculators available online that can make the process pretty simple!

I have known there to be some confusion among clients who have tried to determine this on their own, so I figured I’d walk you through the process so that you can use this tool for yourself :)

My favorite TDEE calculator comes to us from TDEECALCULATOR.NET - it’s easy, it’s free, and it’s accurate!

When you pull up the website, this is what you will see:

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This is where you begin to enter your information. You can choose your gender, then add in your age, current weight, height, and activity level. If you know your body fat percentage, even better! Adding that information will give you an even more accurate result. If you're having a hard time deciding which activity category is right for you, fear not - on the next page, it will show you your TDEE for each activity level available, so you can split the difference and estimate for yourself if you believe you fall somewhere in between :)

I just mocked this up with numbers for an average hypothetical female client for the sake of an example:

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You can (and should) add in your own numbers, of course, to get an accurate TDEE for yourself!

However, per our example above, once you hit the "calculate" button you will see this:


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As you can see, since we chose the "moderate exercise" category, the calories needed to maintain weight at this activity level are shown in bold, but the number of calories needed for maintenance at other activity levels are shown as well so you can choose what seems most appropriate for you based on your habits.

So, this means that for this person, they would need to eat about 2,112 calories per day to neither gain nor lose weight, because that exactly matches the amount of calories their body burns in total each day.

This shows ideal weight as well as BMI (Body Mass INDEX - not to be confused with BMR, Basal Metabolic Rate) for reference too, but I don't put too much stock in either of those because muscle mass is not taken into account when estimating these values... For example, at my leanest I never weigh less than about 170 pounds, and it suggests my ideal weight is about 15-20lbs less than that - yikes! Also, if we were to look at my BMI, I would be classified as "overweight" based upon my height and weight, even when my body fat approaches single digits. These tools CAN be useful depending on your body type, but just know that they're not the only measures of health and fitness!

Finally, I like that this calculator also provides a couple of suggested macronutrient breakdowns for maintenance, bulking (adding muscle mass), and cutting (losing body fat) - this can give you a place to start from if you're just beginning to experiment with counting your macros... Keeping track of that information, no matter what your end game is, is an incredibly powerful tool that can help you achieve your goals as quickly as possible!

So friends, try out this tool and estimate your own TDEE - it's interesting at the very least, and can truly be the foundation upon which you build a successful nutrition lifestyle for yourself!

Have you already calculated your TDEE? Has it helped you? I want to hear about it!

Also, if you need some help or want ideas please let me know - I'm happy to be of service! :)

Please feel free to comment, upvote, or resteem if you'd like!