The 4 Noble Truths

It sounds like the point of this teaching is to deny your senses. That's my first reaction. Craving is said to be the key to suffering. And this craving comes from the use of our senses-which can result in pleasure. A desire to be satisfied through pleasure is craving. So how do we overcome such cravings? By choosing to deny them? By realizing that they are traps? But then balance is mentioned. So are we not truly overcoming those desires, but instead merely learning to not make them our number 1 focus?
I think I agree that if someone can become completely devoid of desires such as the longing to please the self and others, then that person won't be shaken very easily by anything threatening or other that they across in life. The problem I see with this method is that we are still relying on ourselves as the ones to perform the change...and I'm not sure that it is possible for us to completely overcome all of our desires on our own.

On page 41+42 "To give oneself up to indulgence in sensual pleasure, the base, common, vulgar, unholy, unprofitable; or to give oneself up to self-mortification the painful, unholy, unprofitable: both these two extremes, the Perfect One has avoided, and has found out the middle path, which makes one both see and know, which leads to peace, to discernment, to Nirvana." What is the distinction between the two paths here? I thought that he was describing a giving in to our physical and emotional desires through the use of our senses as being a "craving trap"... And if that was an extreme then I would assume that the other extreme would be to completely deny your senses, and give no response to anyone or thing, to have no desire to live. But the two options that he points out seem to be similar. Am I missing something?