Health and Fitness Calculators
Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE)
Your total daily energy expenditure is everything you burn in a day: your basal metabolic rate, plus your training, plus walking, fidgeting and digesting. It is the number that decides whether you are eating at a deficit or a surplus.
Your total daily energy expenditure is about 0 calories a day.
Your basal metabolic rate is about 0 calories a day.
How it works
Your basal metabolic rate comes from the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, and the activity factor scales it up to cover everything you do on top of lying still.
TDEE = BMR × activity factor
A basal rate of 1600 calories with a moderate activity factor of 1.55 gives 1600 × 1.55, which is about 2480 calories a day.
The activity factors
| How much you move | Multiplier |
| Desk job, little or no exercise | 1.2 |
| Light exercise one to three days a week | 1.375 |
| Moderate exercise three to five days a week | 1.55 |
| Hard exercise six or seven days a week | 1.725 |
| Hard exercise daily, or a physical job | 1.9 |
These five steps are a blunt instrument, and the step between two of them is often three hundred calories. Most people also overestimate which one they are in, because a hard hour in the gym counts for less than eight hours on your feet at work.
Reading it instead of estimating it
The activity factor exists because most calculators have nothing to go on. If your watch or ring reports your energy for a whole day, including the part you burn at rest, then your total daily energy expenditure is something we can read rather than something anyone has to guess at, and a fortnight of those days averaged together is a far better number than any multiplier produces.
Connect a service that reports whole-day energy and FitnessSyncer charts it for you. Where only your workouts arrive, the honest figure is your basal rate plus what you logged, and that will sit under your real expenditure by whatever you did that you did not record.
What this number is not
It is not a calorie target. It is what you spend, so eating that much holds your weight roughly steady. A target is this number adjusted up or down for what you are trying to do.
How accurate it is
An estimate from a multiplier is commonly out by three hundred calories in either direction, which over a month is a pound of body weight. Treat it as a starting point, then adjust it against what your weight actually does over three or four weeks.
Common questions
Should I eat my exercise calories back?
If your total already includes an activity factor, then no, your training is counted. Adding your workouts on top of a factor that assumes them is the most common way people end up eating several hundred calories more than they meant to.
Which activity factor should I pick?
Pick one step lower than feels right. The factors assume your whole week, not your best day, and the gap between a desk job with four gym sessions and a physical job is larger than most people expect.
Does FitnessSyncer work this out from my data?
Where a connected service reports your energy for a whole day, that figure is charted on your Dashboard and is a direct measurement rather than an estimate. Where only workouts arrive, your Dashboard charts those and the rest is the basal rate from your profile.
Why has my total changed when nothing else has?
Losing weight lowers it, because a smaller body costs less to run. That is why a deficit that worked for two months stops working in the third, and why the number is worth revisiting rather than setting once.
