BMI with the Asian cut-offs, and the calories your body burns doing nothing
Everything here runs in your browser. Files are never uploaded.Two numbers get quoted constantly in health advice and are almost always given without the context that makes them mean anything. BMI compares your weight to your height and uses a different threshold in South Asia than the one printed on most charts. BMR is what your body spends existing, before you move at all. Both are worked out here with the assumptions visible, because the assumption is the interesting part.
BMI Calculator takes height and weight in metric or imperial and shows the result against both the World Health Organization bands used worldwide and the lower Asian cut-offs. That second set exists for a reason: at the same BMI, people of South Asian descent tend to carry more body fat and face a higher risk of diabetes and heart disease, so the overweight threshold is set lower than the familiar 25.
BMI takes no account of muscle, frame or where weight sits. A heavily built athlete reads as overweight and a sedentary person of normal weight can read as healthy, so it is a screening number for populations that has been borrowed as a personal one. Treat it as one input among several, and note that waist measurement predicts risk at least as well and takes ten seconds.
BMR and TDEE Calculator estimates what your body burns at complete rest, by Mifflin-St Jeor, Harris-Benedict or Katch-McArdle, then scales it by activity to a daily figure. The three formulas disagree by a few hundred calories on the same person, which is a fair indication of the precision available: these are estimates from population averages, not measurements of you.
The activity multiplier is where most of the error enters. Almost everybody overestimates it. If a figure you calculated does not match what actually happens over a month, the multiplier is the first thing to lower.
They are arithmetic on numbers you supply, not a diagnosis and not advice. Nothing here knows anything about your health. If a result concerns you, that is a reason to talk to a doctor, and no calculator on any website is a substitute for one. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
Indian and other Asian guidance uses lower thresholds than the worldwide chart, treating 23 rather than 25 as the point where risk starts rising. The calculator shows both sets so you can see where you fall on each.
It was designed to describe populations, not individuals. It cannot tell muscle from fat or see where weight is carried, so a muscular person reads as overweight. Use it as a rough screen alongside a waist measurement.
BMR is what your body burns at complete rest, keeping you alive. TDEE is BMR multiplied by an activity factor, which is everything you actually do in a day. TDEE is the figure that matters for eating; BMR is the floor underneath it.
Mifflin-St Jeor is the usual default and tends to be the most accurate for the general population. Katch-McArdle is better if you know your body fat percentage, because it works from lean mass rather than total weight.
Because each was fitted to a different group of people decades apart. A spread of a few hundred calories between them on the same person is normal, and it is an honest picture of how precise any estimate of this kind can be.
No. These are calculations on the numbers you type, with no knowledge of your health, medication or history. Anything that worries you belongs with a doctor rather than a website.