Maintain italic style texts from original text document when applying regular body text paragraph style in InDesign

I have a MS Word document that has a lot of text and some words are in italic style. When I paste the text from this document to InDesign layout, I apply regular body text paragraph style to it and then I need to clear overrides, but when I do that, the parts that were italic in original document now becomes regular. I would be very pleased if someone could tell how to fix this, so after applying regular text paragraph style I will not need to go trough all text to search which texts should be italic and this could work automatically. Thanks!