When an individual wears contact lenses, for instance, shape of cornea is changed, so it's important to remove these and leave them out for up to a month before surgery.

In addition, your doctor will instruct you not to apply any lotions, creams, make-up or other products around area of eyes for awhile prior to procedure.

On day of your LASIK eye surgery, you'll receive anesthetic drops in each eye in order to eliminate pain. You'll then be placed on a table which is positioned underneath laser equipment, and doctor will instruct you to look up at a small blinking light.

During your laser surgery, a special instrument will be utilized to hold your eye open, allowing doctor to perform LASIK surgery, while other eye is protected by a shield.

With a couple of hours you'll be on your way home

After making a small incision, doctor will then expose cornea, and apply laser technology that's needed to reshape and repair eye. Once accomplished, flap that was cut open to expose cornea will be put back into position and will heal on its own, without need for stitches. An hour or two after surgery is completed, you'll be allowed to go home.

Depending upon individual, amount of corrective treatment that was administered and quickness of healing process, what can be expected after surgery will vary from person to person.

Speak with your physician regarding recovery expectations before and after surgery and follow any instructions that are given, in order to ensure a successful LASIK eye surgery experience.

The law of calorie balance says:

To maintain your weight, you must consume same number of calories you burn. To gain weight, you must consume more calories than you burn. To lose weight, you must consume fewer calories than you burn.

If you only count portions or if you haven't slightest clue how many calories you're eating, it's a lot more likely that you'll eat more than you realize. (Or you might take in fewer calories than you should, which triggers your body’s "starvation mode" and causes your metabolism to shut down).

So how do you balance practicality and realistic expectations with a nutrition program that gets results? Here's a solution that’s a happy medium between strict calorie counting and just guessing:

Create a menu using an EXCEL spreadsheet or your favorite nutrition software. Crunch all numbers including calories, protein, carbs and fats. Once you have your daily menu, print it, stick it on your refrigerator (and/or in your daily planner) and you now have an eating "goal" for day, including a caloric target.

That is my definition of "counting calories" -- creating a menu plan you can use as a daily guide, not necessarily writing down every morsel of food you eat for rest of your life. If you’re really ambitious, keeping a nutrition journal for at least 4-12 weeks is a great idea and an incredible learning experience, but all you really need to get started on road to a better body is one good menu on paper. If you get bored eating same thing every day, you can create multiple menus, or just exchange foods using your one menu as a template.

Using this method, you really only need to count calories once when you create your menus. After you've got a knack for calories from this initial discipline of menu planning, then you can estimate portions in future and get a pretty good (and more educated) ballpark figure.

So what’s bottom line? Is it really necessary to count every calorie to lose weight? No. But it IS necessary to eat fewer calories then you burn. Whether you count calories and eat less than you burn, or you don’t count calories and eat less than you burn, end result is same – you lose weight. Which would you rather do: Take a wild guess, or increase your chance for success with some simple menu planning? I think right choice is obvious.