Here at MCC, we are participating in weekly wellness challenges. It’s been so fun so far that we wanted to share them with you.

You can do each week’s wellness challenge on your own, or with a group of friends. You can even reward yourself for successfully completing the challenge!

To complete, do each challenge for four days a week, or more if you’d like to set your own rules. We usually do Monday through Thursday.

Are you ready? Here’s the first challenge: Eat breakfast every day of the challenge.

Why is eating breakfast important? Here are 5 good reasons to eat in the morning:

1. It may protect your heart

Researchers found that those who didn’t eat a morning meal were 27% more likely to develop heart disease than those who did. Research indicated that people who skip breakfast gain weight, which can lead to diabetes as well as high cholesterol and blood pressure—all of which can raise your risk of heart disease. The reason isn’t entirely known, but breakfast skippers tend to overeat at other meals and snack excessively throughout the day.

2. It might lower your risk of type 2 diabetes
A morning meal may help you avoid fluctuating glucose levels, which can lead to diabetes. Studies have found that not eating breakfast raises the risk by 21%, even after taking into account body mass, what they ate, and other factors. Women under the age of 65 who skipped breakfast even just a few times per week were 28% more likely to develop diabetes than women who ate it regularly. And if you’re in the habit of dashing out the door for work in the morning with only a cup of coffee, take note: Women in the study who worked full-time had a greater risk than those who worked part-time, the researchers noted, possibly because job stress has been found to raise glucose levels.

3. It gets you moving

Studies have shown that people who eat breakfast are more physically active during the morning than those who don’t. That might be because a temporary increase in blood sugar gave them more energy. It’s interesting to note that those who ate a morning meal consumed more calories over the course of the day than the breakfast skippers, but they didn’t gain weight because they were more active.

4. It might give you a mental edge
Research involving adults and children has indicated that breakfast might enhance memory, attention, the speed of processing information, reasoning, creativity, learning, and verbal abilities. Scientists have found some evidence that those benefits might be a function of the stable glucose levels that a morning meal provides.

5. It just might keep your weight down

Studies have linked eating breakfast with a reduced risk of obesity, including several that showed people who were dieting and ate more calories for breakfast than dinner lost more weight compared with subjects who ate larger evening meals.