BURN
What you actually burn in a day, plus an intake target for the goal you pick. Needs your activity level and a goal on top of the body stats BASELINE already took.
Maintenance is the only honest starting point
Total daily energy expenditure: your baseline, multiplied by the life you actually live. Every gym session, every walk home, every hour on your feet, plus the energy it costs to digest the food itself. This is the number that decides whether the scale moves.
Pick the target, eat it for two weeks, and weigh yourself under the same conditions — same time, same state, same amount of clothing. If the scale has not moved in the direction you wanted, adjust by about 150 calories and give it another fortnight.
Two weeks, not two days. Water shifts of two or three pounds are routine and they will make you change a perfectly good plan for no reason.
Nearly everyone overrates this, and the multiplier is the single biggest lever in the calculation — the gap between lightly and very active is several hundred calories a day.
Four hard sessions a week and a desk job is moderately active, not very. Very active means training is close to daily and you are not sitting still for the rest of it.
Activity multipliers are blunt instruments — five brackets standing in for infinite variation in how much people actually move. Expect the output to be within a few hundred calories, not exact.
Worse, your body adapts. Sustained dieting quietly reduces spontaneous movement — you fidget less, you take the lift — and TDEE drifts down without your permission. This is why a deficit that worked in week two stalls in week eight, and why the answer is usually a diet break rather than cutting further.
The tool floors every target at your BMR and will not print a number below it. Eating under your resting burn is not a strategy, and no calculator should hand you one.
Estimates, not diagnoses. These figures describe averages and your body is not one. Nothing here treats, cures or prevents anything — and if you are managing a health condition, taking medication, or working through a relationship with food, talk to a professional before acting on a number a website gave you.