Nutrition
Calories & daily burn
Your basal rate is what you burn doing nothing; TDEE multiplies it by how much you move. Both are estimates within about 10% — treat the number as a starting point and adjust from what the scale actually does over three weeks.
Result
Breakdown
Worth knowing
- Deficits are a percentage of your burn rather than a flat 500 kcal, because a fixed cut is far more aggressive for a small person than a large one.
- No target here drops below your basal rate — sustained sub-BMR eating is where muscle loss and nutrient shortfalls begin.
- Projected weight change assumes ~7,700 kcal per kg. Real loss undershoots this as your body adapts.
How this is calculated
BMR defaults to Mifflin-St Jeor — 10W + 6.25H − 5A + 5 (male) or − 161 (female) — which is the equation most clinical practice uses. TDEE applies the standard activity multipliers, 1.2 through 1.9.
Common questions
Which BMR formula is the most accurate?
Mifflin-St Jeor is the default here and in most clinical practice, and it typically lands within about 10% of measured resting metabolic rate. Katch-McArdle can beat it, but only if you feed it a genuinely measured body fat percentage rather than a guess.
Why a percentage deficit instead of the usual 500 calories?
A flat 500 kcal cut is a mild deficit for a large person and a severe one for a small person. Scaling to your own burn rate keeps the aggressiveness consistent, which is why the targets here are expressed as percentages.
I'm eating the target and not losing weight. What now?
Every input is an estimate: the equation carries about ±10%, activity multipliers are coarse, and self-reported intake is usually under-counted. Treat the number as a starting hypothesis, hold it for two to three weeks, and adjust based on what the scale trend actually does rather than what the formula predicted.