HALP! Heavy Lifting Made Me SUPAH Bulky!!!

I just spent about an hour reading through these threads and you ladies are all lovely, inspirational and amazing! Congrats to you on your hard work and well deserved results.

I would love to start lifting - but I do not have a gym membership (and I am more likely to workout at home anyways). Right now, I am I trying to lower my BF % with home body weight routines and diet. One day, I want to get to the gym and start a program like stronglits or NROL for Woman...Anywho, congrats to you all!

I don't have access to a real gym either. Lucky my apartment has some weight machines. But for those without machines or access to free weights, try looking into Convict Training or You Are Your Own Gym.

I have a question:

Can I still achieve the same/similar results using the circute machines rather then free weights? After reading this thread (as well as the several others that have popped up over the past few days), I realized that the way I WANT to look cannot be achieved by the low weights I am doing now, so I upped everything today.
Please feel free to critique my work out/weights and let me know what I can do differently or better:

I would say get off the machines if you can. They isolate muscles and only allow movement in a fixed pattern. It's great that you're lifting heavier. That will help. But one of the benefits of strength training is that you're recruiting many muscles at once. For example, when you squat you're working glutes, hamstrings, hip flexors, hip adductors, quads, and your core. Therefore recruiting more muscle fibers, burning more calories, and stimulating hormones that are productive to weight loss and muscle building.

Check out New Rules of Lifting for Women, Stronglifts Starting Strength.

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I have abnormally weak stability due to cns defects and don't have all of my cranial nervous, and my shoulders are a little deformed and don't go "back" properly so I can't do OHP and i find rows and deadlifts hard to get form right. I'm not very confident without a PT and see one twice a week> I use a couple of machines but do bench press/tricep dips/pushups, and front squats sometimes

Thank you Ladies for posting your pics. I can't even begin to imagine how much courage that takes for you and I thank you so much. I've been trying to convince my wife to begin lifting weights but she had bought into the "bulky" myth. Thanks to your pics and stories she no longer believes it and she's excited to start StrongLifts. I'm thrilled because she's counting her calories and now wants and more importantly believes she'll get her body back through heavy lifting.

Thanks! Perhaps in a couple of months we'll post a couple's transformation pic.

I would love abs. Some women need to realize it's not their boob tissue they're losing it's the extra fat they're carrying on and around it. Some people have this horror story made up in their mind (particularly if they're not well endowed). But the more muscle you keep the more they perk and the more fat you lose the less they sag. I lost 8 band sizes and while my boobs have gotten smaller, so has the rest of me, proportionately.