TDEE by Activity Level

Compare Total Daily Energy Expenditure pages by the activity level that best matches your normal week.

TDEE means Total Daily Energy Expenditure: the calories your body uses across rest, daily movement, exercise, physical work, and digestion. Body size and age matter, but activity level is often the variable people misread first. A desk job with three short workouts does not create the same calorie demand as a physical job plus hard training, even if both people describe themselves as active.

The five common multipliers run from 1.2 for sedentary routines to 1.9 for extremely active routines. They are population-level estimates, so the labels need real-world context. These pages explain what each level usually looks like, where people overcount activity, and when to recalculate. Seasonal sports, training blocks, job changes, travel, and life schedule shifts can all move someone between levels for a few weeks or months.

Choose an activity level

Pick the level that describes your routine most weeks, not the hardest week of the year.

Sedentary

1.2x BMR

Sedentary routines built around desk work, long commutes, and evenings on the couch create calorie needs that sit well below what most nutrition advice assumes.

Lightly Active

1.375x BMR

A lightly active routine fits into most working schedules without dominating them.

Moderately Active

1.55x BMR

Three to five days per week of exercise puts you squarely in the moderate activity bracket.

Very Active

1.725x BMR

Training hard six or seven days per week demands careful attention to calorie intake.

Extremely Active

1.9x BMR

Athletic training or physically demanding work most days pushes your daily energy requirement well above sedentary and moderately active adults.

What each activity page includes

Each page gives reference TDEE numbers for three body sizes, lifestyle vignettes that clarify what the activity level looks like, and pitfalls that often lead to overestimating or underestimating daily burn. You also get protein guidance, recalculation advice, FAQs, and a working calculator already set to the activity level so your own measurements can replace the reference examples.