Your basal metabolic rate is roughly what your body would burn over a day spent doing nothing at all: no walking, no training, no work. It is the floor under every calorie target, which is why almost every nutrition plan starts by estimating it.
Calculate your BMR
Estimated BMR—
Fill in every field to see the result.
What the number means
BMR covers only the involuntary work - heart, lungs, brain, keeping you warm. It is not what you should eat. Everything you actually do in a day sits on top of it, so the number you eat to is always higher. Multiplying BMR by an activity factor is what turns it into that figure, and that is what the TDEE calculator does.
Two people with the same weight can land a few hundred calories apart, because height, age and sex all move the result. That is the point of computing it rather than reaching for a round number.
The formula, in words
This uses Mifflin-St Jeor, published in 1990 and the equation most dietitians reach for today:
- Ten times your weight in kilograms,
- plus six and a quarter times your height in centimetres,
- minus five times your age in years,
- then plus 5 for men, or minus 161 for women.
That last step is why the calculator has no sex preselected. The two variants sit 166 calories apart, so guessing would quietly hand you someone else's number.
How a coach uses it in Koach
Koach runs this same equation inside the app. Once a client's body profile is filled in, their BMR appears on their dashboard, and their goal turns it into daily calorie and macro targets: a deficit for losing, a surplus for gaining, the plain number for maintaining.
From there you build the plan the targets belong to - see Create a nutrition plan.