Gaining

It's tough being a gainer without disposable income, that's for sure. I suppose you could look at it as a challenge though. Perhaps you could find some local feeders to help out.

Um...get a job? Preferably at a restaurant or bakery where you get free or discounted food.

I know in the past McDonalds would give employees free food for certain length shifts and I know someone who works for a small supermarket branch which gives near expired/unsellable food to either charity or staff.

You may want to look at an 'idle' job, so you're not physically active often, uch as something office based.

Now as for my job, which is generic retail but fairly physical as I'm based in the stock room, on the one hand I do enough physical work that I joke the company should be promoting it as a gym, on the other hand the shifts are such that I end up getting allot of takeaways e.g. a McDonalds before or after a shift (a potentially good way to hide what you're eating as well).

A few points on the job suggestion.

A good ideal would be an office job that's not too active and provides free pastries, but that's hardly a guarantee. An office job is a good idea anyway, since that's most likely to lead to better paid work in general later on. Fast food is largely dead end. Even if you somehow stay there for years and somehow become the GM, you'd still be stuck with atypical hours and it likely won't help you prepare for jobs with normal work hours later. Same problem with the GM's boss, the district manager except this time, now you have to visit multiple locations. Off hours is required to evaluate service quality. I know 20 years may seem a long time from now, but your long run goal should be a job with business hours and 20 years isn't as long as you might think.

For the sake of free or cheap food, a lot of fast food restaurants are terrible for that now. The nickel and diming has become ridiculous. The signs I saw for working at McDonald's around here advertise a 30% discount, which is pathetic, and only shortly before, after, or during work hours. When I worked at a McD's, it was 50% which I thought was pathetic then. For how little the job pays, I feel like free food should be an entitlement. I should also note I worked at a rare location that closed at 9PM, so despite being in high school I typically worked closing shifts, which meant I could take home the leftover pies. Most are now 24/7 so that doesn't work anymore, though some close at 11PM or Midnight or so.

That they only provided a 50% at the time is not terribly surprising, if you know things the general population doesn't. I learned that 50% of the operating costs was the food, which in the restaurant industry seems very high. In the restaurant industry, the largest operating costs is supposed to be labor. Of course, this is because of franchise agreements, requiring each location to purchase the raw food inputs exclusively from the corporate fast food company. This is one way they enforce the consistency that customers expect. This means they could be paying above market prices for the raw food. I'm starting to digress, but my point is to highlight that typical fast food is a terrible choice.

I notice you're in Washington state, a relatively short distance from the northern border. I don't know if you have Tim Horton's but if you do, stay the hell away. Don't shop there, don't eat there, don't work there. They have a policy where 1) they will throw out all unsold food at the end of the day, and 2) if you work there and eat any of the food, even leftovers at the end of the day that they can't sell anyway, they'll fire you. So, fuck Tim Horton's. So disgusting and wasteful. I also heard of some grocery store chain where the GM dumped bleach into the dumpster to spoil the food and prevent dumpster diving. His words? "Damned homeless; fuck them all." I think he was hoping the bleach might kill off some of them. Don't know what chain that was but I never heard of that as company-wide policy.

If you're interested in a job that might have substantial free food, your best bet is probably some sort of local bakery or doughnut/pastry shop, especially if they advertise freshness. Until Tim Horton's, I never heard of any restaurant having a problem with taking leftovers, and especially not any smaller independent business. Not when they can't sell it anyway. Shops like this pretty much have to make it all ahead of time and the odds are good they won't sell them all. Pastry shops also often close at something like 2 or 3 in the afternoon, which can be a plus too. There's also of course the fact that lots of pastries can be quite fattening, so that's a plus too.

Regular sit down restaurants are likely to be a poor choice, unless the owner makes a point of providing free food to employees. The reason is because nearly all of what they offer is made to order, so most ingredients will thus sit raw until used. There may not always be mistake dishes lying around.

So yeah.. an office desk job if you can, though a bakery might be a good job to start off with for a much younger person.