PE Diet Calculator

What Your PE Score Means

The calculator gives you one number and a colour. Here is the band behind the colour, and what each one says about the food or meal you just scored.

The 1.0 line is the threshold Dr. Ted Naiman uses in The P:E Diet— the point where grams of protein match grams of non-protein energy. Above it, protein is winning the plate; below it, energy is.

Very high scores are all the same score

Shrimp comes out at 48 and chicken breast at 8.6, but the practical difference between them is close to zero — both are about as lean as protein gets. Treat anything past roughly 10 as one tier rather than as a ranking. If a food has no fat and no net carbs at all, the calculator shows ∞: there is nothing to divide by. To separate very lean foods on a bounded scale, the Protein-to-Calorie Ratio Calculator scores the same food as grams of protein per 100 calories.

Score the plate, not the ingredient

Single lean proteins nearly all score in the green, which makes them the least interesting thing to measure. The number that changes your week is the one for a whole meal. A plate of 150 g chicken breast with spinach and bell pepper scores 4.42. Add one tablespoon of olive oil — 14 g, poured in about a second — and the same plate scores 1.98. The chicken never changed; the denominator did.

What the second number is telling you

Protein % of calories answers a different question: not how the grams compare, but how much of the food’s energy arrives as protein. It turns green at 35% and amber at 25%. The two can disagree, because the PE ratio counts a gram of fat and a gram of carbohydrate the same even though the fat carries more than twice the calories. When they disagree, read the pair rather than either one alone — a food that clears both is unambiguous.

One thing neither number decides: how much you eat. The PE ratio grades a food, not a portion, and it is scale-invariant — 100 g of cod and 300 g of cod score identically. A high ratio is not a reason to stop counting calories; it tends to make the counting easier, because protein is the most filling macronutrient per calorie.

About the PE Diet Calculator

Not sure what the number means yet? The PE diet for beginners explains the ratio in plain language, walks through the calculation step by step with worked examples, and gives you a simple three-day menu for week one.

Scoring meatless plates? The PE diet for vegetarians ranks the vegetarian and vegan protein sources by ratio — from seitan at 5.0 and cottage cheese at 2.7 down to lentils at 0.72 — and shows why a day built on legumes and nuts lands under the 1.0 line.

This calculator is based on the formula described in the book The P:E Diet by Dr. Ted Naiman. The Protein-to-Energy (PE) ratio measures how much protein a food contains relative to its non-protein energy (fat + carbs − fiber).

A higher PE ratio means a food carries more protein per gram of energy, which is the lever the whole diet pulls: protein is the most filling macronutrient per calorie, so a higher share of it tends to make a deficit easier to hold. What your PE score means breaks the bands down in full.

Pair this with the TDEE Calculator to estimate your daily calorie needs, then use the Macro Calculator to set your protein, fat, and carb targets.

The PE ratio scores a food, not a day — it tells you what to put on the plate, not how much protein the plate has to add up to. Calculate your daily protein needs in grams from your bodyweight, goal, and training load, then use high-PE foods to hit that number for the fewest calories.

High-PE eating is what makes a deficit liveable; the deficit is what sets the clock. How long it takes to lose belly fat lays out the timeline by starting body-fat percentage and daily deficit, so you can see what a few months of this actually buys.

Raising your PE ratio is a means to a body-composition end, and the honest way to judge progress is body fat percentage rather than the scale alone. If you're aiming at the athletic-lean end, see what 15% body fat looks like for men and for women, and what it takes to get there.

A PE ratio is only as real as the grams behind it, and the foods that move it hardest — oil, nut butter, dressing — are the ones people eyeball. Our best food scales for macro tracking comparison names a winner for each use case, from the best budget scale under $20 to the best 0.1 g precision, tare workflow, and USB-rechargeable picks — and shows what one unweighed spoonful does to a meal's ratio.

The scale is one of three things a PE kitchen actually needs: weigh the denominator, keep the numerator stocked, portion the result. The best kitchen tools for the PE Diet covers all three — which scale resolution matters and why, the lean protein staples worth keeping in the cupboard with their PE ratios, and containers sized for a protein-anchored plate.