With so many high-profile pregnancies these days, it’s impossible to escape the glossy spreads analyzing celebrity pregnancy styles in more depth than we analyze a presidential candidate. But while so many websites pick apart these women with the same kind of disdain we personally reserve for scrunchies and clear strap bras, no one bothers giving real women any advice on how to do it right. So we’ve broken it down with four easy tips so even if you’re feeling like a cow, at least you won’t look like one.

Tip #1: Just because it’s expensive doesn’t mean it looks good on a pregnant body (a.k.a. what we’ve learned from Kim Kardashian). Unless we never got the memo, Valentino, YSL and Balmain have not started a maternity line. You know who those fabulous designer clothes look good on? A 15-year-old model from Russia whose last meal was a pack of cigs and a line of coke. You know who they don’t look good on? Someone whose stomach is four times the size of their head. Under most circumstances we enjoy being label whores as much as the next gal, but this isn’t the time.

That being said, we get that maternity clothes are fugly and we believe they are only completely necessary during the last few months of pregnancy (the exception being maternity jeans which we wish we could wear year round). But when you shop off the rack for non-maternity clothes while you’re preggy, you’re going to have much better luck walking past that Barney’s Co-op and strolling through Zara and H&M instead. High-waisted leggings from American Apparel are great as are the long column skirts from Splendid. And when in doubt, buy a great pair of black maternity jeggings and pair them with a simple and chic black non-maternity top and you’ll pull it off Angelina pregnancy-style. As for shoes, that brings us to the next tip…

Tip #2: Embrace heels. Your hips, back, legs, butt and god knows what else are already going to be sore while you’re pregnant so you might as well look good while you’re bribing your significant other to give you a foot massage later because your feet kill. Under normal circumstances heels elevate an outfit to a much hotter level, but during pregnancy it can be the difference between looking like that blueberry chick they had to roll out of the room in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and looking like Natalie Portman pregnant at the Oscars. The only things worth investing in anyway during pregnancy are shoes and bags. Notice we are not mentioning jewelry. That’s because you should save up the jewelry buying for a really good push present.

Tip #3: Patterns are not your friends. After you see the fifteenth patterned wrap dress at Pea in the Pod, you might start to convince yourself it could be cute on you. It won’t be. You will look like a walking kaleidoscope.

Tip #4: Find five cute outfits and rotate them. We hate repeating outfits too, but it’s so difficult to find chic ones while you’re pregnant that you shouldn’t press your luck. Not to mention, who wants to spend a ton of money on a wardrobe you’ll never wear again? And don’t forget that people have extremely low expectations of your ability to look cute while pregnant so even if they’ve seen the outfit before, they’ll be impressed all over again.

We admit, this tip is a hard one to accept right away. Pre-preggers, we used to stand in the middle of our closets and whine, “I have nothing to wear,” to ourselves, our roommates, our boyfriends or our husbands (the latter of whom have tuned this phrase out by now which is preferable to their previous automated response of “But you have a huge closet full of clothes!”). For once in your life, you truly won’t have anything to wear, but the sooner you accept those five chic outfits as your entire wardrobe, the happier you will be. Besides you have a lot more important things to obsess about. Like how you’re going to dress your baby.