// 24-hour activity timeline

Build your day, not a guess.

"Moderately active" is where most calorie estimates go wrong. Instead of picking a vague label, lay out your actual 24 hours — sleep, desk work, walking, training — and get a TDEE built from your real schedule. It has to add up to a full day, which is itself harder to fudge than a dropdown.

Your 24 hours01
kg
Used with each activity's MET value to estimate calories.
kcal
Leave blank to estimate from weight, or paste your BMR.
Timeline24.0 h left
Estimated daily burn02
This uses MET values (metabolic equivalents) from the Compendium of Physical Activities — the standard reference for activity energy cost. MET values are population averages and were explicitly not designed to give a precise individual figure, so treat this as a structured estimate, not a measurement: it's better than guessing a label because it forces you to account for all 24 hours, but it still depends on how honestly you judge your own intensity and hours. Confirm against your weight trend over a few weeks with the tracker. Not medical advice.

// how this works

One MET is roughly the energy you burn at rest — about 1 calorie per kilogram of body weight per hour. Every activity has a MET value: sleeping is about 0.95, desk work around 1.5, brisk walking around 3.3, hard cardio 8 or more. Your day's calories are simply each block's MET value times your weight times its hours, added up.

Because sleep and rest sit near 1 MET — close to your basal rate — a full 24-hour timeline naturally rebuilds your total daily expenditure as "resting plus everything you did," without double-counting. The tool also shows the equivalent activity multiplier (your day ÷ your BMR) so you can see where your real schedule lands against the usual labels — and flags it if the result is implausibly high, which usually means an activity's intensity or hours were overestimated.

It pairs with the rest of the site: take the calorie figure into the planner to build a goal schedule, or read how to choose an activity level for why the dropdown trips so many people up.

// related