Most TDEE calculators start with a guess
Many calorie calculators ask you to choose an activity level, then multiply a BMR estimate by a broad category such as sedentary, lightly active, or very active. That can be useful as a starting point, but it often hides the question people actually care about: what happened in real life while you ate a known amount of food?
TrueTDEE attempts to estimate maintenance calories using real-world weight trends and calorie intake. The goal is to help users make more informed decisions using actual data, while still being clear that every result is an estimate.
The TrueTDEE philosophy
Data over guesses
Observed intake and weight change can reveal more than an activity multiplier alone.
Trends over daily fluctuations
Daily scale weight is noisy, so longer periods and trend direction matter.
Education over prescriptions
TrueTDEE explains estimates and tradeoffs instead of presenting numbers as exact instructions.
What makes TrueTDEE different?
- Uses observed weight change to estimate maintenance from what actually happened.
- Includes confidence scoring so short or noisy data periods are easier to interpret.
- Shows why longer data periods usually improve accuracy.
- Includes wearable comparison tools without treating wearable calorie burn as guaranteed truth.
- Runs calculations in the browser without accounts, uploads, or stored health records.
Why we built it?
This project was created by a data nerd who was tired of using basic TDEE calculators and wanted to harness the wealth of data we have the ability to track through fitness wearables and food/macro tracking websites. It does not claim medical, dietetic, or healthcare credentials.