The sum of everything you burn
TDEE — total daily energy expenditure — is all the energy your body spends in a day. It's the "out" side of energy balance, and it has four parts:
- Resting metabolism — the cost of being alive: organs, brain, temperature. For most people, the largest share by far, and it scales mostly with lean mass.
- Digestion — processing food costs energy, and protein costs notably more to process than carbs or fat.
- Exercise — deliberate training. Real, but usually smaller than people hope.
- Everything-else movement — walking, fidgeting, standing, carrying groceries. Invisible, wildly different between people, and often the biggest reason two similar bodies burn very differently.
Why yours is hard to know
Only the structure is universal; the numbers are personal. Formulas estimate resting metabolism decently, but the movement components are guesses — which is why two people "moderately active" on paper can differ by hundreds of kilocalories in reality.
How Macros handles it
The app treats the formula as a starting point, then measures your actual TDEE from logged intake and your weight trend. Your expenditure number is your TDEE — observed, not assumed, and updating as your body and habits change. That's also why it drifts away from online calculators: they stop at the guess.