Flavor Flav, rapper and host of the TV dating show "The Flavor of Love," has worn an oversize clock as a super-necklace for years, saying, "It represents time [as] being the most important element in our life."

Clearly, he's hip to how heavy time can be.

Now two new studies confirm: It turns out the span of hours in a day that you consume food and how late you stay up are directly related to the excess weight you pack on.

Those tasty morsels of research come on the heels of the news that the obesity rate in the United States is at or above 30 percent in 22 states, and no state is below 21 percent. Clearly, many people need easy-to-use tools to improve weight management!

Well, the two studies offer just that!

The first one, from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, shows that most folks spread their food intake over 15 hours or more in a day. But when study volunteers cut down their grazing time from 14 hours to 10 or 11 hours, they lost an average of 3.5 percent of their excess body weight in 16 weeks.

The other study, from UC Berkeley, found that over a five-year period, for every hour adolescents (we bet it affects adults too) pushed their bedtime later, their body mass index went up 2.1 points!

So apply these two simple techniques — eat for fewer hours and go to bed earlier — and you'll lose some of that heart-harming, diabetes-inducing, joint-damaging weight!