A Guide to Game Mechanics: Some Extra Help for if You're Confused on Lack of Progression
I've played this game a lot over a good period of time, and while the guide is nice to have to telling you how to get to the next stage of a character's progression (even if for some reason Victoria won't appear for me, I'm troubleshooting that ATM), it also doesn't go in depth into some hidden mechanics in the game. This guide aims to help you understand them, since some of them are required for getting items or generally useful to know.
Reloading saves:
You can save at the beginning of each day (and when you move in to your love interest's apartment), and each save will be saved as a separate save.json file in whatever folder your browser downloads to by default. You can reload saves by reopening the html file and loading your save from there- I recommend closing the previous game's tab when you do this so you don't lose what game tab is the one you're actually playing. I wouldn't mind a "Load Save" button in the main after work screen, since keeping the save button for the morning only is fine for this game.
Gluttony
Gluttony is the most important hidden stat. The game doesn't tell you this anywhere, but gluttony is what allows you to generally, eat more at once. The higher your gluttony, the more options appear in certain places, and follow up options will appear as well. To increase this stat, you'll want to pick the option that has you eating the most food (Stephanie's donut events, work pizza days, and the mall's food court are good, consistent ways to increase gluttony). High gluttony helps you gain weight faster, and is required for getting later hot dog vouchers, since each hot dog contest increases in difficulty. The buffet at stage 8 is the best way to increase the stat. If you still aren't winning the competitions after repeating gluttony raising events, then you will need to increase your weight.
Weight Stages:
Weight Stages are your main 'measure' of progression, each achieved after getting to a certain weight. I'm not sure of the exact numbers (the game tracks weight internally in metric, while I've played with imperial, I may update this guide after a metric playthrough to add the stage values). You start at stage 1 and end the game at stage 10.
Save Editing:
I understand that this can come off as cheating, but after playing this game for so long, having to either go to bed early to wait for money to come in or wait for events to pop, I generally consider save editing not to be cheating but time saving. There's still a lot of clicking you need to do to advance the game, and really the only things save editing can do is make numbers bigger or smaller (unless you want to take the time to read the absolute mess a 100+ day save file looks like to find variables, in which case, be my guest). I generally set money to an arbitrary value, and when I first buy groceries and make foods for Lilly I'll set them to arbitrary values too. Mostly this just saves time spent clicking buttons over and over. This notably does not work on the ice cream vat, since that's hardcoded to be one only, and setting the value above 1 will act like you don't have one in your inventory, and the cart won't sell you another. You will have to reload a save after editing it in order for the change to take effect, so closing the current game's tab and reopening the html file will become an annoyance, but it's less annoying than the alternative to me.
That's about it, hopefully you enjoy this clicking simulator a bit more now that you know a bit of what's going on under the hood. I'm gonna go restart my playthrough now.