Estimate your BMR, TDEE, and daily calorie target using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation — the formula clinical research rates most accurate for healthy adults. No signup, no email, nothing stored.
Knowing your number takes 30 seconds. Hitting it every day is what most people quit. DailyC is a voice-first calorie tracker — say what you ate, AI counts the calories. No food database, no barcode scanning, no photographing your lunch.
Download DailyC free Free · No account required · Uses this exact calculationYour daily calorie target is built in three steps, and every number above is shown so you can check the math yourself.
BMR is what your body burns doing nothing at all: keeping your heart beating, your lungs working, your temperature stable. This calculator uses the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, published in 1990 and validated by a 2005 systematic review as the most reliable predictive equation for resting metabolic rate in healthy adults:
| Sex | Formula |
|---|---|
| Male | (10 × kg) + (6.25 × cm) − (5 × age) + 5 |
| Female | (10 × kg) + (6.25 × cm) − (5 × age) − 161 |
BMR is multiplied by an activity factor to account for everything you do beyond lying still. These multipliers follow the activity coefficients used in the Institute of Medicine's Dietary Reference Intakes:
| Activity level | Multiplier | Typical week |
|---|---|---|
| Sedentary | 1.2 | Desk job, little deliberate exercise |
| Moderate | 1.45 | Exercise 3–4 times per week |
| Active | 1.6 | Exercise 5–6 times per week |
| Athlete | 1.75 | Intense training most days |
Be honest here. Overstating activity is the single most common reason a calorie target "doesn't work" — an inflated multiplier hands you an inflated budget.
To lose weight, this calculator subtracts 500 calories per day from TDEE — the moderate deficit in NIH/NHLBI clinical guidance for gradual weight loss, which works out to roughly one pound per week. To gain, it adds a lean 300-calorie surplus. Targets are never set below 1,200 calories per day.
Roughly 500 below your TDEE for about a pound a week. Larger deficits work faster on paper but are much harder to sustain and cost more lean mass. The best deficit is the one you can hold for months, not the biggest one you can survive for a week.
BMR is what you'd burn lying in bed all day. TDEE is BMR plus everything else — walking, working, training, digesting. Your calorie target is built from TDEE, never from BMR.
Within about 10% for most people, which is close enough to start. What makes the difference is not the precision of the estimate — it's whether you actually track against it consistently.
No. A food scale improves precision, but the failure mode for most people isn't imprecision — it's quitting. Estimating consistently beats measuring perfectly for three days and giving up. DailyC is built around that trade-off: you say what you ate and AI estimates the calories, so tracking takes about 30 seconds a day.
Two numbers. Calories, so you stay in a controlled deficit without undereating; and protein, which clinical guidance emphasizes to preserve lean mass during rapid weight loss. DailyC covers calories; its sibling app DailyP covers protein — both voice-first, about 30 seconds each per day.
Mifflin MD, St Jeor ST, Hill LA, et al. (1990). A new predictive equation for resting energy expenditure in healthy individuals. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 51(2), 241–247. — PubMed
Frankenfield D, Roth-Yousey L, Compher C (2005). Comparison of predictive equations for resting metabolic rate in healthy nonobese and obese adults: a systematic review. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 105(5), 775–789. — PubMed
Institute of Medicine (2005). Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein, and Amino Acids. National Academies Press. — Read
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (1998). Clinical Guidelines on the Identification, Evaluation, and Treatment of Overweight and Obesity in Adults. NIH. — Read